I recently tried to access a story about the Huntington Fire. I soon found out that I needed to pay for a subscription just to access this story. In my opinion this is crap. I buy a paper almost every day because quite frankly your home delivery has been unreliable. It seems to me that the people making the choices for your paper are doing everything possible to ruin your paper. I guess that I`ll stop buying your 5 pages of news and buy the Springfield paper instead. Small community newspapers across the globe are facing an immediate crisis and that is, remaining relevant while also trying to stay in business. The bottom line is: news is not free and giving our content away for free online would be a death knell to The Westfield News and would surely force us out of business rather quickly. We have done quite a bit of research and found that there is no media entity that gives their content away for free and has shown this to be a successful business model, no matter the size of the operation. Even the New York Times, which has more than one million online subscribers has, not only employed a form of customers paying for their content, admitted that their online presence doesn’t make nearly enough revenue to sustain them as a viable media company. (This article will show that their online revenue is only 14 percent of their total revenue picture http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/business/media/new-york-times-co-reports-9-million-profit-in-3rd-quarter.html?_r=0)
