Oh, btw, Newsday.com’s somewhat popular website has dropped 1000 places in rank in the first month alone behind the pay wall. Awesome strategy.

1. “Guess you’ll have to go find some other parasite news source that rips off the work of real journalists.” … 2. “Maybe you should have subscribed. Newsday is pretty good paper.” … 3. “How is this anything other than ‘I want something, but I don’t want to pay much for it, and that frustrates me, so I’m angry at the person who wants to charge me for it.’?” … 4. “Maybe you’re looking at this move from the wrong perspective: It’s not about generating revenue on the web, it’s about protecting its core revenue source, the newspaper.” … 5, “The reality is that Newsday isn’t leaving any money behind, because nobody who advertises on Newsday cares about reaching you out in Colorado.”

OK, #1: I said that given that Newsday.com has erected a paywall, it’s dumb to exclude out-of-market people who might be willing to pay for a single piece of content that someone else directs them to. Technology is available to accomplish that. Newsday’s is a strategy to focus exclusively on its local market. Hey, fine, if that’s what it wants to do, go for it. I’m saying it will fail because it’s a strategy about protecting the past rather than figuring out how to do well in the future by leveraging the Internet instead of fighting it.

#2: It’s unrealistic for a regional paper like Newsday to expect very many people in Colorado, or California, or Alaska or anywhere else, to pony up $5 a week. Sorry, it’s not the New York Times; and even if the Times decides to go this route (I doubt Bill Keller and his executive team are that dumb), they’re unlikely to get the online subscription numbers to match revenue from other strategies. TimesSelect demonstrated that, and pissed off the star columnists behind the TimesSelect wall because they lost a huge chunk of their audience, and thus their influence. A Newsday columnist already quit over this exact issue.

#3: Given the availability for publishers who choose Newsday.com’s route to charge in many different ways, my complaint is about offering up only one option that is likely to be acceptable only to people within its local market. If Newsday had put a one-off price of 50 cents on viewing the story, maybe I’d pay; if it asked $2.95, I’d have gone elsewhere. The market will decide what price point works (if any). I could easily find similar content to the article I cited elsewhere, so I’m not “angry”; I merely pointed out the lack of wisdom of limiting the options and leaving money behind.

#4: As Bill Burger aptly suggested, the strategy in fact devalues Newsday. It’s no longer part of the national conversation; its influence by way of this new strategy will sink to that of a community weekly (albeit a large community). Newsday.com is an added-value item for its cable subscribers and print-edition subscribers. The website itself is worth little beyond that, as it now is irrelevant outside its geographic area. It’s a business strategy to shore up a dying business (printing newspapers), which will fade over time anyway, and give a boost to its cable operation over its competitors. If Newsday’s owners are only in it for short-term gains and don’t care about long-term viability and long-term quality journalism for Long Island, then it’s a fine business strategy, I guess. Expect to see an exodus of journalistic talent from Newsday; what motivation do they have to work for a news brand that is so devalued and without influence beyond its local area? Keep the paychecks coming in during hard times? Oh, that’s a great recipe for inspired journalism.

#5: The point about leaving money behind is for payments for content by some outside the local area. With solutions available to add a one-off payment option, it’s silly to leave out that option. As for out-of-market advertising, then Newsday has cut off another revenue stream: national advertising fed to visitors from outside NY. That may not be big, but every revenue stream counts in the current environment.

One last point: I mentioned a piece of non-unique content that I couldn’t get to without subscribing (which, again, is not practical for me based on my location); many others covered the new Google Droid phone, so plenty of other (free) options. But what if the content I wanted was an investigative package produced by Newsday reporters that had significance outside NY? Would Newsday.com still demand a subscription for people in Colorado and elsewhere to see an important public-interest investigation that, from a public-service point of view, as many people as possible should know about? I’m disturbed by the public-service mission that newspapers typically have; perhaps Newsday’s owners don’t really care about that. But you’d think the least they could do on an investigative piece is offer a one-off price and not demand a subscription.

Newsday’s move to a pay wall is is all about Cablevision’s competition with Verizon on Long Island for subscribers who spend $2000 a year on cable, internet, and phone.

And because 75% of Long Islanders are already Cablevision or Newsday subscribers, Newsday can put up the pay wall without losing the audience that subscribers want to reach. And there’s no way to make any money by selling things on the net from 25 or 50 cents; Newsday would pay more to process those charges than they would be paid by you.

It’s actually a very reasonable financial plan for them – but only them. But I don’t think there’s another newspaper in this country which could use this model, because Newsday’s circumstances are unique.