Categories: OLD Media Moves

Why The Information is successful at charging for tech news

Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times explores why five-year-old tech news site The Information is successful at charging for its content.

Manjoo writes, “Consider Ms. Lessin’s plan for The Information, the tech news service she started in 2013 after spending eight years at The Wall Street Journal. Back then, online subscriptions seemed antiquated; many companies had experimented with charging users, but most had failed to win large numbers of subscribers, and the big money in media was in ad-supported sites aiming for rapid expansion through viral traffic.

“‘People thought no one would pay for news, especially tech news,’ Ms. Lessin told me last month. ‘The problem was the news business hadn’t been focused on a key question: How do I deliver a differentiated product that people would pay for?’

“Her idea for differentiation was to charge a lot for The Information — a subscription is $399 a year, close to what The Wall Street Journal charges for print delivery — but she would offer readers quality instead of volume.

“The Information publishes just two or three stories a day, often scoops and analysis, including a handy daily roundup of the most important stories in tech that day.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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