We're not charging for online. We're offering digital memberships!

The Sun Sentinel, which forgot how to be a good newspaper more than a few years ago, is learning the art of marketing copywriting. Operators standing by!!!

Starting April 9, Sun Sentinel will join newspapers across the country, including Boston Globe, LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Star Tribune and Dallas Morning News, by offering memberships to its website.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sfl-sun-sentinel-digital-memberships-letter,0,5619392.htmlstory

 

Membership to read Fievel The Mouse's deli adventures when he gets to go to the Big City with the Fish on road trips? I am so there! Sign me up!

 

I'm hoping that when they offer those memberships to the website, they simultaneously offer the option of reading the website without a membership.

Oh? They're not? Oh, well.

 

"Please be reminded that all gentlemen members are required to wear jackets and ties in the dining room. Thank you."

 

Award-winning sports?
Must direct you to the archive upon log in.

 

Ooooo. Burn.

 

I laughed today when this publisher's note was on page 2 of my Sunday paper (the only one I get now), the same Sunday paper that put the Final Four on Page 8C (admittedly with a tease).

 

A couple of years ago, the award-winning Sun Sentinel's 1A centerpiece was a giant graphic and a few accompanying lines on How to Pick a Mattress. It was riveting stuff.

One of only two stories on 1A that day.
The other story was consumer fluff, too.

 

Posted without comment:

 

I don't pay.

 

I wonder what they're going to do with me and my Sunday-only paper with regard to the paywall. I'm suspecting not much.

 

And since people often go do a lot of big-item shopping on Sundays and get into general coupon-focused consumer mode, that was probably pretty well-read stuff. The more and more I look at web metrics, the more and more I realize that the average reader is far more interested in things like that than the probing public-records-based investigative piece on the local government.