The newsonomics of 99-cent media

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
Honk if you still love newsprint enough to pay $700 or more a year for a seven-day print subscription to The New York Times. Of course, you have many other choices.
You can try one of several print/bundled options for considerably less money. Or if you want to be parsimonious, you can get 10 free article views a month, or more if you want to work the social and search on-ramps to NYTimes.com. Maybe you want to be among those who pay Ongo $1.99 a month, and get 20 Times news stories a day, among lots of other news content.
Love the Guardian, and want to follow each tick of the U.K.’s Murdoch saga? If you’re in the U.S., you can subscribe to the lively iPad edition for $13.99 a month — or access it for free via the Safari browser on the tablet. In the U.S., its smartphone app is free, but in the U.K. and Europe, it requires a subscription. Of course, it’s quite successful Facebook app gives you access for free as well, anywhere.
If you’re shopping the Ongo news kiosk, look at wide spectrum of prices individual publishers are charging for access through that product: The Guardian is 99 cents a month, The Christian Science Monitor is $3.99, while the Chicago Tribune is $9.99 and The Boston Globe $14.99.
It’s not just newspaper companies that offer a patchwork of buying (or not buying) choices.
Are you a late-arriving fan of AMC’s series “Breaking Bad”? If you want to catch up and subscribe to Netflix streaming, you’ve got a good deal at the $7.99 a month rate. Cram in the first three seasons’ 37 episodes in a single month (where did that month go?), and you’ll pay just 21.5 cents per show, and anything else you have time to watch is gravy. Ah, but if we want to watch Season 4, which you can’t yet see on Netflix streaming, you have to upgrade to those red envelopes and get Season 4 DVDs — but it’ll cost you another $7.99 a month, and you’ll have to wait until the DVDs are released in June. (Ah, maybe that’s one of the reasons Netflix’s maladroit move to streaming is pushing it to a loss.)
Or you can turn to Amazon VOD and get the episodes for $1.99 each (or $2.99 in HD!), or $25.87 for the season. Or why stream when you own the DVD in a few weeks for $29.99 (or add an extra 10 bucks for added Blu-ray clarity).
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/04/the-newsonomics-of-99-cent-media/