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October 21, 2009

3 Tidbits

Ted Hope tweets, "NYC is considering a $3200 fee for filming in city owned buildings. This is a bad idea when we need to attract more movies here."

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“The cinema as we know it is falling apart,” says Francis Ford Coppola.

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Smart insight on how people use content from, of course, the WSJ. The plan is to take advantage of the heavy business users who have become used to the tools developed for the paper's online side and to charge them 50 bucks a month - as opposed to the 150 bucks a year currently set as the online subscription rate - to keep using them and to add more services, like access to Dow Jones Newswires or Bloomberg L.P.

This has been the holy grail for outlets like Variety, which have been trying to figure out for a long time how to hit multiple audiences at varying price points. Of course, they gave up one area of turf they should have owned with box office, where Box Office Mojo now has a lot of non-paying eyeballs, but a large number of subscribers at $78 a year (or so) who want more flexibility in using BOM's numbers (and avoiding ads).

The problem with trying this with most news and certainly film and tv industry news, is that there is nothing to own. "First" is just not important enough to generate a subscription from many people. A service that no one else can deliver is valuable... and no one owns movie news. (All we can try to do is to deliver the best opportunities to get to it and to get the best writing out of many, many options.)

The Hollywood Reporter and Variety used to be The Place to follow developing projects in print. Again... something they should have owned. But they don't seem to be focused on maximizing opportunities like that... narrowcasting. Everyone wants to be a broadcaster. Mistake.

Posted by dpoland at October 21, 2009 01:03 PM

Comments

That NYC building thing:

UGH. I know I already wrote a long piece about it, but I really do miss that 70s, 80s NYC vibe in film.

And for 10 years it was that cheap, clunky, shot-in-Canada look that marred 60% of studio films, all set in the forest and shit...

Now it's all these mid-sized U.S. cities offering insane tax breaks... so we're getting *big action movies* set in such ever-cinematic locales as Shreveport, Ann Arbor, and rural Western Pennsylvania. I think I've seen 30 movies shot in Pittsburgh in the last 12 months alone.

Nothing against any of those places really, but what was that old Ebert line about "He's a Toronto cop on the edge..." not having the same kick as NY, Chicago or LA? Similarly seems a little underwhelming to have big gunfights in the mean streets of Shreveport or Denzel chasing runaway trains through rural Ohio.

Posted by: LexG [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 21, 2009 04:10 PM

$197 for WSJ online now. Wasn't happy about that sticker shock (up from $119last year) when the automatic renewal charge showed up on my statement with no advance warning (although they claim they mailed letters). Couldn't cancel fast enough.

Posted by: RP [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 21, 2009 04:14 PM

Newsday on Long Island has announced that its website is going behind a paywall. Home-delivery subscribers and those whose ISP is (corporate cousin) Optimum Online will get unlimited access. Everyone else will have to pay $5 per week.

To make things even better, the paywall goes up on Wednesday, October 28 -- the first day of the World Series. Splendid timing for all the Yankee fans out there.

Posted by: Chucky in Jersey [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 22, 2009 07:35 PM

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