The main source of national and international news is the Associated Press. To a large degree, the newspaper business consists of taking AP product, adding some local news, wrapping it in advertising, and selling it to the local market.
So it is interesting to note that the AP's annual revenue in 2007 was $710 million. Daily newspaper circulation was about 51 million, so do the arithmetic and newspapers paid $14.20 per subscriber for a service that provides a hefty slug of their news product. (This is a maximum; AP also gets paid by radio, TV, and Internet users of its product, so not all the cost is on subscriptions.)
For this, newspapers collected $55 billion in revenue, over $1,000 per subscriber. That is a pretty good mark-up.
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