Here's my two cents: About nine months ago, the Laconia Citizen was sold by Foster's newspaper of Dover NH to a small town newspaper conglomerate from Pennsylvania for what was probably a pretty cheap price, and the new owner got to use the existing Citizen website for nine months. Nine months has passed and the new owners are now on their own with the website, so it looks like it is now crunch time while they try to get their "free readership" to switch from a free newspaper website to a paid newspaper website. Does the readership control the newspaper, or does the newspaper control the readership?
Will the new
www.Citizen.com be able to get their readers to go from free to paid or will many readers just switch over to reading the three, all-free New Hampshire local newspapers:
www.laconiadailysun.com,
www.conwaydailysun.com, and
www.berlindailysun.com? Only time will tell?
And, the
www.concordmonitor.com just announced that it too will be switching from free to paid starting on May 4, so how's about that? So, that leaves us with the mostly free
www.unionleader.com which is the largest NH newspaper and one which many readers probably love to hate, due to its' Fox News style of reporting and editorializing, plus its' brief and unintelligent news writing style, but everyone just reads it anyway, because that's all that there is for New Hampshire.
It all makes the good old days of walking to the store and paying 25-cents for a fat daily paper seem like those were truly the good old days!