Like so many others, we’re moving away from the practice of pumping our print content online for free. We’re now in the last stages of developing a Drupal-based CMS that (we hope) will help us to differentiate our online publishing activities from our print publications and also make it possible for us to begin charging [...]
Once again, Steve Outing has offered some solids tips for implementing an effective pay wall (even if he’s not sold on the wisdom of the approach in the first place). In this critique of the NYT’s plans to eventually move to a metered pay wall, Outing suggests a number of smart tweaks, including setting a [...]
Here’s the basic story line on the so-called original sin of newspapers in the digital age: Foolish publishers started giving their content away for free online in some vain grab at traffic and potential online ad revenue, thus “training” people that news is free. Now they’re stuck in a world of their own creation, where [...]
Jonathan Stray has posted a tool at the Nieman Labs site to model the financial impact on newspapers that put up pay walls. He uses NY Times data to critique their recently announced decision to start charging Web users for access.
We, too, are in the thundering herd of US newspapers moving toward charging for access. (More on our plans in a later blog.) So I played with the tool a bit to see what it might foretell for us and other papers.