A couple separate but somewhat relates observations:

1. A digital subscription to the Washington Post is $14.99/mo. Netfix is $7.99 (WaPo also has $9.99 price point but it isn’t comparable with their phone/tablet apps). Considering that I would say most people spend more time consuming entertainment than reading news, this price difference strikes me as odd (though not irreconcilable).

2. It is true that the business models of the two companies are different (one creates all it’s own content while the other purchases content and bundles it for the end user), but in my mind this seems to point out another problem of the traditional newspaper model, that in the former any subscriber only gets (additional) access to content from one source, while the in the latter they get content from many sources.

3. It used to be that for efficient distribution, articles needed to be bundled together on a physical medium (like paper), but that is no longer the case. So it doesn’t seem clear that delivery of articles should be based on the source of production any more. This is possibly why sites like the Huffington Post, which depends on aggregation, have gotten so popular.

4. Still, ad based models have their own problems (though they do have their place). I wonder if it’s feasible to have a subscription based aggregation model. I would actually be willing to pay a monthly fee to have full access to say certain number of articles from high quality sources (The Financial Times, The Economist, The NY Times etc). But paying a subscription for each individual publication is prohibitive for me (and I’m guessing most other people).