Information wants to get paid
At least one Rhode Island paper seems to be making online content almost exclusively available to subscribers work for it. From Newsweek:
Spooky things began to happen this summer in the yachting mecca of Newport, R.I., shortly after the Newport Daily News hurled caution to the wind and began charging a $345 subscription fee for its online news—$200 more than for the print edition.
First, the phones stopped ringing in the paper’s circulation department. Fewer subscribers were canceling home delivery of the paper, something they had been doing in droves when they knew they could get the same product for free at NewportDailyNews.com. “Those calls have stopped,” William F. Lucey III, assistant publisher and general manager, told NEWSWEEK.
But something even stranger happened: after the Web site put up a pay wall for nearly all its content, readers would brave driving rainstorms to go out and buy the newspaper. Since then, newsstand sales of the Newport Daily News have jumped by 200 copies a day. For a paper with a daily circulation of 13,000, that’s a significant gain, especially since, in an era in which most papers are seeing steep declines in readership, even holding steady is a success; an increase is a triumph.
The paper has what local papers pretty much everywhere have: A monopoly on professionally generated local news. According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, Newport has a median household income of $35,669, so a $345 annual subscription fee — more than what it costs to subscribe to the Economist — certainly would drive folks to the newsstand, and in large numbers, assuming any interest in the local news. (That end of the equation is a different department’s issue, obviously.)
Former Daily Press Hesperia reporter Hillary Borrud now works at a paper in Oregon that does something similar (and is also family-owned, so decisions to throw up a “pay wall” don’t have to be run past a board or stockholders).
I don’t know that pay walls are the solution for what ails the newspaper industry, but they may not be as crazy as many people (including me) once thought they were. It’d be hard to erect one if your coverage area was served by multiple entities — it’s not hard to get lots of Capitol Hill coverage, for instance — but in a community like Newport, that’s not the case.
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Even the NYT (which has messed up its model entirely), has features only available to subscribers of the paper paper. Why wouldn’t everybody? The model in the rest of the tech world is being called ‘freemium’ — give a little free, charge for upgrade (say, your first 3 articles a day are free, otherwise you just get summaries/abstracts — almost exactly what the WSJ does)
Comment by Joel Y — September 2, 2009 @ 15:51
I gave a summary of the quoted selection above to my wife, who is from R.I. and she said, “You know why that works? Because New Englanders are cheap and they are gossipy.”
Comment by Jeff Hamilton — September 2, 2009 @ 20:42