Newsonomics of digital cafeteria

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting
Here’s how newspapers sell what they do to would-be readers. You can get the whole paper, now sometimes including digital access. We’ll sell you Sunday only, or the weekend, or 7-day, but you have to take our whole paper. That’s what we sell; that’s our one-size-fits-all product. It fit your grandparents and your parents, so why shouldn’t it fit you?
If newspapers were in the restaurant business, they’d be out of business quite quickly. That’s not much of a menu. There’s practically no à la carte, other than single copy, which is again the whole thing, but just once. It’s prix fixe, with early-bird specials for introductory signups.
That longstanding (with the prices going up as the product largely declines) menu is about to change. We’re moving — maybe smoothly, but my guess is fitfully, just like the newspaper industry does everything else — to a cafeteria approach. It’s a digital cafeteria, of course, making use of the infinite flexibility of digital production and marketing.
In early 2011, we see the first moves into supplying the new news and information cafeteria. These have been largely propelled by the Kindle (“The newsonomics of Kindle Singles“), but soon we’ll see a cascade of iPad products as well, resplendent with links, photos, and videos that the Kindle products largely lack.
Though we’ve seen new works trickle into the marketplace so far, I’ve heard of a number more in the pipeline. They will redefine once again the nature of digital journalism and, I strongly believe, of pay models overall. While we focus on the huge question of the day — will digital news subscriptions succeed or fail as a business model? — my guess is that by 2015, more than 20 percent of news companies’ “digital circulation” income will derive from one-off products. We’re talking tens, and then hundreds, of millions of dollars. It’s time to start thinking about the newsonomics of this digital cafeteria, the obstacles to its grand opening and how they’ll be surmounted.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/the-newsonomics-of-the-digital-cafeteria/