Newspaper Paywalls

[gworg]

The Globe and Mail has announced that it will begin charging for online content in the fall of 2012. PostMedia has announced that several of its newspapers will also charge for online content. NYT and WSJ articles are more and more for paid subscribers only.

Globe to charge for online content

I'm curious as to how forum members get their Canadian news now and will they subscribe to digital newspapers. News, particularly business news IMO, has value but there are too many possibilities that make it financially difficult to subscribe to all sources. Discovering the right ones looks like a challenge.

[timlocke]

I subscribe to The Times which has a paywall. I have a print subscription to the National Post and the Economist so I can see all the online content for free should I wish to.

I read the G&M 2 or 3 days a week in paper but I doubt I'd pay for a subscription either online or print.

I don't care about the NYT or WSJ

I get my "local " news from City TV ( I lived in TO for many years so that news is still local to me)

[jshel101]

I usually get my Canadian news through twitter feeds from Calgary Herald and Calgary CTV. I don't think I would subscribe to digital newspapers, not unless I was forced to because of lack of free content. However, I am happy with the content I currently get.

[reidw]

Any newspaper website that starts to charge for their info. gets dropped by me immediately.

[Francois Caron]

Same here. Having to pay for the content AND have my browsing habits tracked and sold to the highest bidder? No thanks!

[nic78]

Horrible mistake. I read the G&M daily, and if I have to pay to read articles I'll just browse else where. They had this set up 5 years ago and dropped it. They should just charge a cheap rate for A News Stand version or PDF downloadable in a App to your iPad.

[nfitz]

I get two papers on the doorstep each morning.

Absolutely ridiculous that any major paper would give away their product for free - only serves to alienate their paying customers.

I'd think that any paper worth reading will be paywalled soon. Perhaps with an exception for a handful of articles a year or something.

For those that are desperate, I'm sure the CBC will still be giving away free news.

[Mole]

When anyone goes to this model I drop them and so far I have never felt the loss, save for when The Onion tired it for a few week many years ago. I guess it is either this or start throwing hipsters breast feeding tweens on you cover.

[travisc]

nfitz, you are part of a declining minority. In my neighbourhood, I can think of one household that receives a newspaper every morning. I don't think giving it away free on a website devalues the physical edition - it's going the way of the dodo regardless.

There will always be places providing free news and financing it via advertising - so if those guys exist, the paywall sites will always fail.

[nfitz]

Originally Posted by travisc

nfitz, you are part of a declining minority. In my neighbourhood, I can think of one household that receives a newspaper every morning. I don't think giving it away free on a website devalues the physical edition - it's going the way of the dodo regardless.

Declining a bit, but circulation numbers aren't down that much over the last 20 years, surprisingly. Might even be up overall, given how widely Metro and 24 circulate.

Still, if it really does go the way of the dodo, surely a paywall is inevitable, unless you think the entire thing will be paid for by advertising.

[Dr.Dave]

It looks like some Postmedia newspapers will join the "pay" club.

After a trial of a metered subscription service for online content at the Montreal Gazette, Postmedia plans to roll out the initiative to the Ottawa Citizen and Vancouver Sun

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8GS53A20120528

[audacity]

I typically do my news reading through two sources:

1. Google News
2. Google Reader (RSS)

Google requires that if a story is to be included in search results (or in Google News) then when the user clicks on a result they must get the story - not get prompted to authenticate or pay money. Online news sites currently get most of their traffic through searches and aggregators. If they were to make the proposed changes that would prevent people from finding their content via those content aggregators and search engines so they would take a significant hit in viewership - which would significantly hurt their advertising revenue.

The subscription rates for physical papers are so low that I imagine it barely covers the cost of printing and distribution - most of the money in the "news via dead tree" business was primarily driven by advertising revenue.

Post Media's plan might be to shift the dependence these news companies currently have on advertising advertising and move towards getting more money direct from the reader. The problem is that they would lose a lot of search engine exposure in the mean time

The other problem is that, unlike the "dead tree news era", Internet readers have a lot more options open to them when it comes to content. When I'm browsing Google News I often don't pay much attention to which site I end up clicking on to go read a version of the particular story I'm interested in. It is also surprising how much of a carbon-copy these stories are from site to site.

So this move will be an interesting experiment. Will readers subscribe, or will they continue with their current habits of just reading whatever source shows up on Google News (which would no longer include the Globe and Mail).

Some news sites give you a couple free articles to read and then prompt you to pay. When you get blocked, here is what I do:

1 - Turn on your "private browsing" feature (e.g. Incognito in Chrome, InPrivate in IE, etc)
2 - Google the title of the article that you wish to read
3 - Click on the link to your article

The news site won't block you from reading the article if you come in via Google for the reasons mentioned above.

Ultimately I think the reason these efforts will fail is that unless all news organizations take the same approach, readers will just read free articles that contain the same information on competing sites.

[Nels Stewart]

It looks like the Postmedia paywall party is beginning in earnest. The Vancouver Sun and Province have announced they're behind metered paywalls as of today. In his "letter to readers," the Sun's editor in chief Harold Munro cites the New York Times and The Guardian as other great papers that have had to institute paywalls to help recoup some of their investment in journalism. Problem is, the Times and Guardian actually produce journalism. The Sun's website, meanwhile, is ripe with tawdry photo galleries like "Top 10 red carpet fashion mistakes!" or "Dogs we love" designed (or, rather, "curated") to up the hit count as cheaply as possible. No thanks. I'll keep my seven bucks a month.

[magnet]

Agreed, most articles are off of the CP/ AP newswire or use photo galleries for stories.
I prefer the USA Today method of advertising. You click a link, get a popup ad with a Click here to continue. The advertisers still get a person to see their ad, and the consumer gets the information they want.

Honestly, this with be the death of "newspapers" in this country.
People will go to alternative sources to get their information.
If both papers in Calgary turn to paywall, I'll just use the websites of the all-news radio stations and the local TV stations in conjunction with news.google.ca

I haven't bought a newspaper in years.
Classified ads have been replaced by kijiji.
Recycling of the paper is a waste of trees.
Information is literally "yesterday's news".

[JohnnyCanuck]

I might be in the minority, but there are reasons to justify subscribing to certain newspapers. Primarily, I believe that there is no substitute for a top tier columnist such as Vaughn Palmer (Vancouver Sun). To me, being well informed requires more than the cursory coverage provided by wire services, news aggregation, and cursory coverage such as provided by USA Today. To that end, I can justify paying a reasonable amount to subscribe to the Vancouver Sun (which is not a very good newspaper but does have Palmer, Michael Geist, and Jonathan Manthorpe), and The Globe and Mail for it's more substantive coverage of most issues and its stable of very good columnists.