“My understanding from people who work there is that they made probably close to $500,000 during the course of that four months,” former San Francisco Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein tells Bloomberg West host Emily Chang about his old paper’s paywall, which it installed in late March of this year and disabled in August.
So why didn’t it work, Chang asks Bronstein, who is now the executive chair of the Center for Investigative reporting.
“Paywalls are an attempt to keep the audiences they have and keep them paying,” Bronstein, who stresses he wasn’t involved in the paywall’s installation, says. “But that audience is dwindling.” Journalists, he says, suffer from from “higher calling disease” and are scrambling to reconnect with an audience that now seeks news from many channels.
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