Posting has been light because I am attending the Social Computing Symposium in Redmond.
At The Pitch in September, Kathy Gill told me that the financial crisis could be the end of may struggling newspaper companies. The Seattle Times is certainly one of the fragile ones as a family-owned independent company.
Today, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (our other, Hearst-owned Seattle paper) reports that the Times is pulling its standalone business section inside the A section.
But the problem isn’t that you have too many standalone sections. OK, there are many problems, but I think one worth pointing out is that the paper is a bundled product – it doesn’t serve a niche like magazines do (and magazines seem surprisingly resilient to the internet’s disruption so far).
I wonder what would happen if paper subscribers were allowed to choose which sections they wanted?
Just something to think about.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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