“I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper,” Dan Jacobson, the publisher and owner of the TriCity News of Monmouth County, N.J., tells David Carr of the New York Times. “The Web makes no business sense for us.”
Jacobson’s strategy is to “aggressively ignore” Web publishing, which puts him decidedly out of step with the industry. But as publications are dropping like flies and survivors are scrambling to find ways to generate income online, the TriCity News model may be worth examining. As Carr reports:
[The newspaper] just published the biggest issue in its history. The product is double-digit profitable, and it has been growing at a clip of about 10 percent a year since it was founded in 1999, right about the time the Web was beginning to put its hands around print’s neck.
