They have seen themselves as traditional broadcast outlets, encouraging readers to gather round their site and discuss what they have read. The longer viewers remain logged onto their site, resisting the impulse to go elsewhere, the more advertising revenue can be generated from the site. Readers usually don't pay anything for the service provided on the web site and advertising is hardly the gold mine that it can be for conventional media. But one still wonders whether the lack of an immediate economic incentive and the risks associated with trying something new are sufficient explanations for the minimal experimentation with the new forms provided by the Web. It is difficult for people trained in certain media conventions to consider abandoning them to create new strategies.
Readership can originate from anywhere that is affluent enough.
From the viewpoint of a journalist working independently, the economic disincentive to set up a Web site and troll the Internet for readers and then look for advertisers is certainly compelling. But here too there is more to it than simple economics, since many universities and other institutions provide free or inexpensive access to the Internet. With all the available talent and energy in journalism, it is dismaying how few interesting experiments have been attempted to tell the story of today's world in different ways. One of the difficulties here is that freelance work usually involves providing information to some corporate entity. And it is certainly difficult to travel the world and then come home and build a complex Web site.