"The point is, somebody’s got to experiment. We’ve got to try stuff."
-- Ted Power, vice president of Gannett’s West Group, speaking about plans to erect a paywall on July 1 at The Spectrum of St. George, Utah. Gannett also will add paywalls at The Greenville News in South Carolina, and at Florida's Tallahassee Democrat.
Why is everyone acting like the Paywall experiments are a big surprise. Last summer we were told by our publisher that there would be a handful of Gannett sites testing paywall models in 2010. It's amazing how many people don't pay attention to what's going on.
ReplyDeleteYour publisher may have been exceptionally candid.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes the powers that be think that the same people who are rejecting their decimated print products are going to pay for the same claptrap online with a few more AP pictures thrown in? At some point, maybe someone will realize that readers aren't as dumb as our leaders think they are. Maybe then they'll try something revolutionary -- give the reader his money's worth, no matter what the platform.
ReplyDeleteOh, wait. This is Gannett we're talking about. Never mind.
The Spectrum's publisher wrote a column today on the subject: http://tinyurl.com/28mw97s
ReplyDeleteI read Donnie's column. Anyone taking bets on how long that 12-pages of extra news stays around on Sunday?
ReplyDeleteI just went to The Spectrum's website and noticed that the banner ad at the bottom was for a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. Incredible.
I also went to the Forums section... what a joke. Most of these haven't been updated in over a year by any reader. Maybe this portion of the on-line experience isn't being promoted heavily enough.
Six local stories today... I think they're going to have to do better than that to be able to charge for content.
Funny that he calls the product a "full content model." Seems like that would have been fixed by a copy editor.
My hats off to them... it's a bold move. I honestly hope that it works.
I find the selection of the three paywall test sites interesting. Gannett has selected a tiny and relatively undistinguished product in Utah (St. George), the Talahassee Democrat (a paper it received as part of a purchase - the TD came along for the ride, but it wasn't the primary target) and the Greenville (SC) News, also an acquisition, that has never fully embraced Gannett policies and oversight.
ReplyDeleteThe paywall policy is wrong-headed on so many fronts that it is impossible to list them all. But primarily it appears designed to force people to buy print rather than develop and enhance the digital content enough to make it actually worth spending money for. Greenville particularly has resisted the idea that digital content is the future.
It will be interesting to see what happens and that is what Gannett is doing. These papers are the cannon-fodder in the information wars. At the very least, they should have picked papers that put a real effort into enhanced digital content that might make it worth paying for - although $10 per month is a ridiculous amount to charge.
When these papers see their page views and visitors dropping like a stone and their advertisers balking as a result, they may find they're on a path that they can't recover from.
So Gannett is willing to sacrifice three newspapers to find out what any intelligent observer of the media business - or event just an avid consumer - should know: trying to artificially bump up a dying print product by forcing people to take it is a prescription for failure. There are too many other places to get the information.
It's a sad day for Greenville, St. George and Tallahassee, newspapers in general and Gannett in particular.
Thanks, Chris. I agree.
ReplyDeleteTed Power is a puppet. He'll find a way to mess this up just like he did Circulation in Reno. Or maybe its another way to employe his wife at $70-80k a year. Just another publisher that should be gone.
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ReplyDelete9:56 you are soo wrong. Circulation in Reno is up. Last month's total circulation ws up and greater than the same period last year. I feel bad I have to bust your negative bubble but the truth is the truth.
ReplyDelete5:12 circulation is up but thats only because it was given away. Plus it's easy to be up year over year when such big losses happen the prior year. They had to do something to correct the mistakes.
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