Subject: Re: 2 Shots Across the Bow (long post) From: sjones@alaska.net (Stan Jones) Date: Tue, 25 Jun 1996 21:39:39 -0800

This . . .

>Woven through most presentations at the Newspaper Association of America's
>Connections Conference earlier this month were two latent fallacies.
>(remainder deleted to conserve bandwidth)

. . . is one of the most insightful and provocative posts ever submitted to
this list, IMHO.

It's radical, in sense of going back to the root of a thing and thinking
about it from scratch. I've been entertaining many of the same thoughts and
asking myself many of the same questions; I thank Vin for saving me the
trouble of trying to organize it into a coherent statement as he did.

One addition to this line of reflection: It's anything but clear, I think,
that flat-rate Internet access will survive. I think eventually local phone
companies will raise hell about it at their end of the pipe, and the people
who run the Internet backbone will eventually realize the only way to clear
the logjams we're seeing now is to institute traffic-based charging.

If flat-rate access does go away, I think the Web newspaper is dead, period.
No one will pay $1.95 an hour (or anything close to it) to read news
onscreen, wait for graphics to load, and so forth.

This is another reason, I think, that newspaper publishers ought to be
rethinking whether they want to abandon the ancient
select-package-and-deliver model as they go online.

>From my own perspective, I figure I get somewhere between 10 and 100 times
as much news by email as I do by browsing the Web. I suspect the same is
true of many others on this list.

If two electronic newspaper publishers offered identical products at
identical prices, except that one was on the Web and one was delivered like
email, it would be no contest for me -- I'd take the email version.

Stan Jones
Anchorage, Alaska
*I speak only for myself*


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