From a who will pay for news piece in the business section of today’s New York Times:
How do you get consumers to pay for something they a have grown used to getting for free?
Some industries have pulled it off. Coca-Cola took tap water, filtered it and called it Dasani, and makes millions of dollars a year…
“With bottled water, it’s a kind of snobbery and the percetion of healthiness that they have marketed,” said Priya Raghubir, professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University.
So, maybe news organization should try filtering their current news offerings to purify them of detritus and then selling the newly-processed product on snob appeal and healthiness (in a world of free-flowing “news,” ours is uniquely good for you)? ABC News goes Aquafina? And who would be the pricey artesian water — the Fiji– of news?
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.