The Boston Globe next year will split its digital news brands into two distinct websites, keeping Boston.com free while establishing a subscription-only pay site, BostonGlobe.com, which will feature all the content produced by the newspaper’s journalists, publisher Christopher M. Mayer said today.
The change, scheduled to take place during the second half of 2011, is aimed at building an audience of paid subscribers online, a strategy that newspapers across the country increasingly are moving towards. With this approach, the company also aims to maintain high traffic to Boston.com, one of the nation’s largest regional news sites and a site that generates revenue from advertising.
Boston.com will continue its focus on being a “one-stop source for all things Boston” that offers breaking news, sports, and weather, from a variety of sources, as well as classified advertising, social networking, and information about travel, restaurants and entertainment, Globe officials said. Boston.com’s audience will have limited access to journalism that appears in the newspaper, but will have wide-ranging access to content the Globe’s newsroom produces throughout the day for the website.
Genius, what took them so long? Whistling in the wind, information wants to be free? What do you think of this idea?
somervilletom says
I’m glad to see it, frankly.
<
p>Now I want to see what it costs and what that fee buys me.
<
p>A few years ago, I signed up and paid for “premium” services on the Accuweather site. What I got was substantially worse than the free site. Pages not loading, dead links, broken “features”, the whole shebang.
<
p>It turned out that almost ALL of Accuweather’s traffic went through their free site, and so the free site got ALL the support and development attention.
<
p>I’m therefore waiting to see what transpires from The Globe.
mark-bail says
and demand will work out the problem of paying for news, but maybe not in favor of good cheap news. The difference between cost and price may not
<
p>Charging enough to make money a profit or break even and having people pay for it–the economic solution–may not exist. The demand for good news coverage may not be great enough to support profits in the newspaper industry.
<
p>I don’t subscribe to any newspapers, though I check out Boston.com, Masslive.com, and gazettenet.com daily. The thing is that I don’t read any of them all the way through. Masslive The Springfield Republican) barely does anything worth reading; it’s little better than local television news coverage. Two-thirds of the Globe is irrelevant to Western Massachusetts. If I had to pay for the Globe, I probably wouldn’t read it at all.
<
p>My guess that the eventual solution is a subscription to, not just the paper, but a number of papers or a number of services. I might subscribe to the Globe, for example, if it were packaged with the New York Times and a couple of magazines or useful services. You might have companies that created such packages and sold them.
ryepower12 says
It’d need the “sports” package, “entertainnment” package, etc. etc. etc… but I think it could be a model that works.
<
p>The thing is, though, I don’t think there’s going to be any one model that works. I think there’s going to be a number of them. What we think of the news, and how we get our information, may be drastically different. Some of it may be surprisingly similar, though much of it probably won’t. What technology offers us, more than anything, is choices — which seems to indicate to me that, with all those choices, one monolithic model of delivering the news won’t work anymore.
sabutai says
I think the big story is that the Globe is going to start employing journalists. Apparently the current group of stenographers for the NYC office will be trimmed.
<
p>People will pay lots for top-quality news. The Atlantic — top-quality — had an article on this about The Economist — also top quality. I subscribe to both and wouldn’t want it any other way.
judy-meredith says
Dan Kennedy in Media Nation reported this morning that Dan Beard of Boston.com was leaving to join State House News alumni Jim O Sullivan at the National Journal.
<
p>
<
p>May have to subscribe, though I do like Matt Visor’s coverage in the Globe. And I love Globe Reader so there.
<
p>
stomv says
then maybe the knuckle-draggers would keep it down.
jimc says
I think it’s an experiment. If they can make it work, they’ll start phasing back the print version. But more importantly, the Times will follow suit if it works. And if the Times does it, then many newspapers will follow.
hrs-kevin says
As long as people still want to buy it, and many still do, they are not going kill their print edition. There are still many people who prefer to read a physical paper and advertisers have not lost interest in coupons and inserts.
topper says
Perhaps they could start by reporting the news instead of editorializing it.
cos says
… but it sounds like they’re implying that they’ll move some of the articles that currently appear on boston.com to the pay site. If they move a lot of their full length articles to the pay site, they’ll lose readership and influence but not gain much for it. Nobody wants to link to stuff that’s behind a paywall, so the stuff on there won’t be shared much through blogs, twitter, facebook, email, etc., and will effectively be lost. If they can actually get enough paid subscribers paying high enough rates that they can support the paper without advertising, then it might work for them, but so far I only see that sort of thing working for publications that really have their own niche, where that niche isn’t “we’re the ones who cover this particular city”. If you’re The Economist or Far East Economic Review, you can do something like this. But even the NY Times failed on their attempt, and if any traditional newspaper could do it it’d be them.
nopolitician says
The NYT tried charging for the “meatier” content and failed. I think they have it backwards — they should charge for the breaking news and leave the older and meatier stuff available for free.
<
p>I also think that the paid online content should be included for print edition subscribers. I subscribe to my local paper, but I would be really, really offended if I was asked to subscribe to an online version of it too, particularly when the cost of delivering to me that is virtually nothing, and I’m already supporting the writers with my print subscription.
david says
It will be, according to the Globe story.