![]() The people who are most interested in obituaries are older people, the most loyal group of newspaper readers.Or more families and funeral homes will publish their obits at (which may be a whole different kind of obituary problem for news organizations). Many, if not most, funeral homes publish obits on their web sites. She wasn’t on, but the second person I tried who was listed in the Old Era obits was. I easily found another obit for her at another news site. I just visited the Old Era site and looked online for one obituary, chosen because she had a distinctive name. People can find the obituaries somewhere else.Good luck making that look like you’re not looking for a way to squeeze a little more money from grieving people. The Old Era is charging both to publish the obituary and to read it. … No part of that fee is associated with a promise to circulate that obit worldwide.” Nice value proposition on the fee for publishing an obit. Schreiber blithely explained to Mitchell: “Our premise is that when a family through a funeral home pays for an obit, they’re really paying to alert the community the newspaper circulates. ![]() But the Old Era is not throwing a paywall around its whole news site, just the obits. You can justify making obits available in the print edition only for people who pay, because the company charges everyone for the print edition. Families of the deceased already pay for the newspaper to publish the obituaries. The Old Era is double-dipping on death.Here are four reasons this move will backfire in a big way: What I will explain here is why, in the long and shameful history of newspapers refusing to innovate, this might be the most shortsighted, stupid move yet. Mark Potts did an excellent job of that.Īnd I won’t repeat my general arguments against paywalls, which I have repeated ad nauseum. I also won’t explain how shaky the Journalism Online projections are. I won’t explain the plan here Poynter’s Bill Mitchell and paidContent’s Staci Kramer gave Old Era Editor Ernie Schreiber lots of opportunity to explain his rationale and projections, which are equally ridiculous. People who read more than seven obits a month at the test site, LancasterOnline in Pennsylvania, will be denied access unless they pay $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. Journalism Online’s sucker in this fantasy-based paywall experiment is the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era (oh, the irony in that name I will call it the Old Era for purposes of this blog). ![]() Apparently that’s the plan of Journalism Online, a profiteer seeking to cash in not only on newspapers’ death wish but on the deaths of their readers. If I were seeking to kill off newspapers (I’m not), I would try to persuade them to charge people to read obituaries online. The slowest gaining markets were Denver, up 1.5 percent, and Seattle, up 1.6 percent.Update: Ernie Schreiber, editor of the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, has responded to this post. Portland was down 0.7 percent year-over-year. Not all markets in the 20-city index were riding a wave of price increases. It was down to an average 6.87 percent Tuesday morning, said Mortgage News Daily. In the last week of November, the average interest rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage was 7.2 percent, said Freddie Mac. There were 1,982 home sales in November, said CoreLogic, which is the seventh-lowest sales month in county history, show records going back to 1988. He noted monthly data shows San Diego prices rose just 0.2 percent from October to November.Įven if prices are going up, it doesn’t mean there is a lot of real estate activity in San Diego County. ![]() Zillow senior economist Orphe Divounguy, who was in San Diego on Tuesday for a conference, said it’s important to remember that prices were starting to drop around this same time last year. The San Diego County median resale single-family home price was $925,000 in November. The Case-Shiller Indices track repeat sales of identical single-family houses - and are seasonally adjusted - as they turn over through the years. But, she said buyers in higher cost markets, like San Diego, should not expect drastic price cuts. She wrote that it’s possible some high-cost markets could soften in the new year because rising prices with higher interest rates are potentially unsustainable.
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