Posted on 09/13/2011 10:27:31 AM PDT by raccoonradio
The Globe’s new paid Web site will be closely watched by other media outlets as newspapers face the economic squeeze caused by more readers getting their news over the Internet, experts said.
“The more experiments like this, the better,” said Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. “We’re still all wondering what the business models — and that’s models — will be for the future.”
The new site will be free until Oct. 1 and $3.99 per week thereafter. Boston.com will remain free, with breaking news, sports and blogs, which Gillmor said could be a drawback.
“When I look at Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com, I’m not certain why people won’t find Boston.com more than sufficient,” he said. “That’s something they’re going to have to figure out.”
On the other hand, Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, said Boston.com could help.
“It does have a large customer base of its own,” Edmonds said. “They reach a lot of people who don’t look at the print paper much at all.”
Tobe Berkovitz, a Boston University communications professor, said competition from ESPN Boston and blogs could be behind the decision to keep sports news free.
“If you go pay with that, no one will go there,” Berkovitz said. “The question is always what are the options that the media grazers have?”
Globe spokesman Bob Powers said the new revenue source would bolster the paper’s journalism. “Our research has shown a greater willingness on the part of readers to pay for digital news and information,” he said.
Herald Media President and Publisher Patrick J. Purcell touted the Herald’s free Web site bostonherald.com yesterday.
“There is a lot of really good, original content generated by our newsgathering operation and people are responding, as evidenced by significant growth in our online traffic,” Purcell said. “We’re mindful that the way folks consume news is constantly evolving and that, coupled with the need for newspapers to find new revenue streams, will determine how we best serve our readers as we move forward.”
I won't pay for the "Globe-Democrat" in newsprint. I'm sure as hell not gonna pay for it online. Supposedly the free version (boston.com/globe as opposed to bostonglobe.com) prob won't have a lot of the stuff I re-posted here (others, too, mostly to show how far off they are). Bye bye Globe! (btw columnist Charles Pierce is the latest to flee Morrissey Blvd...)
an Act of Congress that allows one to copyright world events. That’s the only way I see online news sites making any money.
Boston Globe put up a pic of web porno that now-convicted Chuck Turner said was US Army soldiers raping Iraqi citizens, IIRC...Mike Barnicle...
$12 a month?
And they dont even have to pay for newsprint?
good luck with that
on a side note- I always thought FR should have a “mandatory” donation of $15 for the YEAR (thats $15million bucks, folks - DO IT JIMROB)
Once again, managers of a newspaper do not know what business they are in. They think they are in the information business, they are not.
They are in the advertisement business. They make money selling eyeballs, yours and mine to people who want us to see their ads.
The content is what brings eyeballs. Anything that makes it harder for those eyeballs to reach the ads is counter productive.
There are still enough places to go to get information for “free” that there are few incentives to pay for content.
More than likely, no, they won't. For most of them, they'll just become "former readers".
The Globe still has readers? Who knew?
The only people who in their wildest dreams think this could work absolutely lack any form of pattern recognition. It has been tried, and tried again, and the results are always a disaster.
About the only way it *might* work would be to do things in reverse. That is, make a *new* section behind the pay wall, offering *new* content already thought of as being *worth* something.
I would start by getting d/l music tracks from every indy band in town, which they could probably get cheap, and the bands would like because it gave them free publicity and also showed potential venues an audition in case they were looking for live music.
Next, again behind the firewall, would be to host citizen opinion column homemade videos. They would get a lot of hothead subscribers who would pay a double pay wall fee, just to have their stupid (if moderated for obscenity and slander) ideas out there, even if few people would watch their stuff.
They could even have special subscriber coupons, with a unique code for each subscriber. These could even be tailor made for a particular subscriber. That is, the newspaper could let retailers, like grocery stores, know who their subscribers were, and they could compare that with their store card information. “This guy buys a LOT of toilet paper from us, so let’s give him personally a volume discount.”
This is the way to get people to pay to see your paper. Then only slowly, over time, start to migrate parts of the paper behind the pay wall. They should never, ever, put their front page there, however, as it is the “loss leader” to get people to visit their site in the first place.
The San Francisco Comicle has recently embargoed some of their Sunday columnists from the SFGate website. Only readers of the paper version can read some of these editorials.
What they have actually achieved is making their columnists completely irrelevant.
Oh, well.
I don’t read the Globe site when it was free....I sure as hell won’t pay a nickel for their shit now..
I didn’t read the Globe site when it was free....I sure as hell won’t pay a nickel for their shit now..
It follows. The Worcester Telegram and Gazette (who I blog for) is also owned by the New York Times so this was only a matter of time. It will go about as successfully as the T&G’s pay site is going. They lost readers by the boatload.
And guess who prints the Boston Globe? The non-union Boston Herald!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.