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March 29, 2024

News industry analyst Ken Doctor: ‘People will pay for quality content’

“People will pay for quality content. When the Times launched a paywall in 2011, people joked about it and said it would never work,” said Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst, on a recent Digiday Podcast, hosted by Brian Morrissey. “But even since before the Trump bump, we’ve seen that higher-quality legacy publications can get people to pay.”

Doctor discussed subscriptions for local news publishers, FCC decisions, the problem with digital-only models, Tronc and more in the episode. Below are highlights, edited for clarity.

Listen at Digiday.com