Boston Globe Launches Pay Site

Hurray for the Globe...here's hoping that the more major newspapers do this it will start a trend down to the smaller markets. You purchase a subscription via nook or to get the print edition, it shouldn't be a surprise that you're expected to pay for a subscription online.

It's our job to be available through the new technology, but why should we be expected to give our product away for free.

 

You could probably count on one finger how many people in Boston have a Rivals.com subscription.

 

I can't give you metrics, but I recently attended a webinar about the NYT model and the guy from the Times (don't ask me who, this was about a month ago) claimed that they were very happy with the results so far.

 

The product shouldn't be free, but it still won't change the fact there are more options to get news and opinion. The main question is how to increase demand for a paid product when local and national TV outlets provide news for free. You can't beat free, even if the writing on TV websites is dreck in many markets.

 

Depends what it is. If it's a gamer, probably not. If it's well-done enterprise, maybe. If it's recruiting news you have to pay Rivals/Scout/247/ESPN to get because traditional media basically doesn't cover it...well now, THAT'S where subscribers start seeing value...

 

Let me clarify. I believe that all printed sports content will be available for free on boston.com. At least that's how I read the announcement in the print edition.
Let me say this without pleasure, as I have many good friends there and they and others continue to do good work. Speaking as a reader, the Globe in any format is becoming an increasingly mediocre product. There's a reliance on formula in both writing and editing that just doesn't cut it.

 

Rather than start ahead thread, The Day of New London, Conn., once a great paper, not only has installed a pay well, but they are trying to spin it as something positive.

http://www.theday.com/article/20110914/BIZ02/309149928/1018

 

I think these pay models are a short-term solution only. The long-term issue is how to get the 20-somethings who don't read the newspaper to buy in.

Also, I'm not sure anyone should be following the NYT pay model, except maybe the Washington Post. People outside the area go to those papers for more than just local coverage. Can't say that about hardly any other paper (not counting WSJ) that I can think of.

 

Not faulting you, but this sort of thinking is part of the problem. People still want information-perhaps more than ever-but the bundle of information provided by newspapers no longer makes sense in the Internet age. When newspapers controlled a monopoly over the delivery of information, combining local news, world news, opinion, arts, sports, business into one publication worked fine. The Internet, though, destroyed newspapers' monopoly over delivery mechanisms, though. With the cost of delivery now essentially zero, there's no real reason to package all this information on one website. As a reader that might only care about Boston sports, let's say, why subsidize a bunch of other things you don't care about?

 

Convenience!! That's why. Why do Americans go through the drive-in window of McDonald's rather than going to three or four food stores and making a decent dinner at home? The "lumping" of information of various types is why readers go to newspapers and newspaper Web sites, which, lest we forget, have enormous traffic.

 

But that's exactly the point: the Internet greatly decreases the cost of increasing the number of sources you read. Indeed, it's the opposite of the hypothetical you posit: going to four restaurants would be difficult; going to four different websites is easy.

 

Not so much anymore, and in my day job I visit many, many Web sites daily. The time sites spend loading advertising software and advertising research software makes each individual visit much more time consuming than it used to be. And if you only have one set of that crap to load, it saves time.