Ongo is the brainchild of Alex Kazim, a former eBay executive who ran Skype and headed up marketing and business operations for PayPal, writes Jeff Bercovici for Forbes. Last September, Kazim secured $12 million in funding from Gannett, the New York Times Co., and the Washington Post Co.
Subscribers pay $6.99 a month for access to the top 20 stories in The New York Times and all content from USA Today and The Washington Post, plus one other paper of their choosing. Other participating GCI papers include The Des Moines Register, The Cincinnati Enquirier, The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Detroit Free Press, The Indianapolis Star, and The Tennessean at Nashville.
Press release. Other news coverage. Video explains how it works:
Related: Gannett Digital President Jack Williams is on Ongo's six-member board of directors
Subscribers pay $6.99 a month for access to the top 20 stories in The New York Times and all content from USA Today and The Washington Post, plus one other paper of their choosing. Other participating GCI papers include The Des Moines Register, The Cincinnati Enquirier, The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Detroit Free Press, The Indianapolis Star, and The Tennessean at Nashville.
Press release. Other news coverage. Video explains how it works:
Related: Gannett Digital President Jack Williams is on Ongo's six-member board of directors
Making it easier to find and read news is an important part of the battle. But even more important: Producing news people want to read in the first place. Ongo, the iPad and all these other digital readers won't make weak content stronger.
ReplyDeleteI don't think they will get many people to pay $6.99 a month when they are used to getting news for free from websites. If everybody started to charge at once, maybe, but as long as there are sources for free (Huffington Post for example), this won't work.
ReplyDeleteCONTENT IS WORTHLESS .....ALL GCI newspapers no longer provide adequate news coverage of local or national events.
ReplyDeleteToo many typos and poorly written and edited. Gannett's "Good Enough" has run its course. Real news readers go elsewhere for their needs. Sad, but true. GCI papers have become the laughing stock of newspapers.
No mobile site? No app for Android or iPhone?
ReplyDeleteI'd use it as a one stop news source. It's not just Gannett supplying the news.
I agree with 1:23, I'll go to Huffingtonpost before I'll pay to 'buy' news and you will too after you see what is going to happen to your local Gannett website redesign... you'll be going elsewhere. Top 20?... by whose choosing? You might get endless articles about Lindsay Lohan going to rehab. I prefer to pick my own top 20.
ReplyDeleteThe flipside of this is, gee I hope it works, perhaps we'll all get part of Craigs bonus this year when they 'trickle it down'.
Is anyone else having difficulties getting to the normal USA TODAY site?
ReplyDeleteEverything I get urges 'Subscribe'
I don't recall seeing any advance notice of this change. Typical GCI- don't give a damn about the few readers they have left.
Waste of an investment. Jack Williams is grasping at straws here with this investment. Ongo is a joke in the industry. The founder has many skeletons in the closet.
ReplyDeleteThis might have been cool 12 years ago. Those horses fled the barn long ago.
ReplyDeletezzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..............
ReplyDeleteOngo is going to be a non-starter. The *only* thing it offers is curation, which anyone with an RSS reader or Twitter account (or Google News) can do for free.
ReplyDeleteReflexive bashers miss the point again (no news there). This is an ad-free subscription model. It's pretty cheap and risk-free R&D. What's the downside?
ReplyDeletePosted this in the wrong place at first ...apologies...
ReplyDeleteI'm not a reflexive naysayer at all, but I can't possibly imagine why I would pay for someone to deliver any of these titles. First, the pool is ridiculously small and doesn't quite understand one's media "diet" for lack of a better word. You might want NYT and Slate, throw in Rochester's paper if you happen to actually live there and like local news, but how is that worth $$$ to me? I can't click on three sites on my own? I'm not going to care about schools in Alaska or Tennessee, for obvious reasons...It just doesn't strike me as something worth any of my money. Hulu Plus or Netflix makes more sense when no one can afford a moment's distraction thanks to stuff like furloughs and layoffs, but I digress....And the downside 11 p.m. is that it's one more thing Gannett touches that fails. At this point they are doing nothing but artificially propping up the stock price by burning down the house beam by beam. Sooner or later, investors are going to realize they are holding smoking remains of a thing, not an actual thing and will vote with their feet.
(oh and everyone realizes in today's blogger world, once a story gets hot or commented on, it creeps out from behind the pay wall pretty quickly. I doubt I would ever for New Yorker articles online. If it's really newsy, someone will post in full on their blog, or I can wait for print. They smartly realize it's not a money making strategy, it's just a digital delivery format for a small group of people.)
ReplyDeleteOk Gannett bashers, do you also despise The WP and NYT? And by the way all you so called newshounds who enjoy proclaiming to the world you would NEVER pay for news and information online, that is the reason traditional media companies are laying off news personnel. Because you and your pals won't pay for it. What business school did you go to where the company gives away their product? If news organizations are going to survive it will be online. If it is online someone I'd going to have to pay fir it, the model has to change. Ads at $10 a thousand aren't going to pay the bills. And while I am at it, you are the same bashers who didn't subscribe to your own paper when times were good. It must be sad to be so negative all the time. You know who you are. Respect and Dignity!
ReplyDelete1:53 What have GCI, WP and NYTCo. done in the past year to improve the quality of the content they're trying to sell via Ongo? Better distribution channels only work when you're producing something people think is worth paying for.
ReplyDeleteConsider USA Today: Is the editorial product better than a year ago? Please cite specific examples showing why it is -- or isn't.
Jim is absolutely right. People are willing to pay only for added content. Plain vanilla coverage is available elsewhere online and you can find it for free.
ReplyDeleteI think we need to learn the lesson from Jon Stewart, and do something to manipulate the news. What won't sell are stories on last night's State of the Union address, or what I class as the dull but important government news. Reporters have to become sales people and sell their stories not just to editors, but to the public. We are not doing this yet.
"Consider USA Today: Is the editorial product better than a year ago? Please cite specific examples showing why it is -- or isn't."
ReplyDeleteIs this a joke? People always post here in generalities.
I doubt anyone here, including Jim, can post coherently about the editorial product.
This is Jack William's bio on the Ongo website listed n Board of Directors. Can anyone tell me which one of his investments has worked? Saridakis should have fired Jack Williams when he had a chance to do it before he let this place.
ReplyDeleteJack Williams is the President of Gannett Digital Ventures, which oversees Gannett's portfolio of online classified companies and other diversified businesses. He represents Gannett in various partnerships and investments and serves on the Board of Directors for Careerbuilder, Classified Ventures, Homefinder.com, MetroMix, Imaginova, quadrantONE, Ongo, Topix, as well as several other companies. Jack also serves on the Gannett Management Committee and is responsible for the development and implementation of online strategies, partnerships, or investment initiatives across all digital platforms.
This isn't even better distribution.
ReplyDeleteI can get to a New York Times story faster on the NYT site. If I want to be tipped to an NYT story I might not've been otherwise, it's more likely to happen via Twitter or Facebook.
The fact is, most serious news readers already have set up avenues to get the kind of news they want -- Google News Alerts, RSS feeds, phone tickers, any number of apps. There's no need to pay $6.99 per month for it.
Once again, newspapers are behind this curve. And Gannett papers are falling behind the curve on E-readers for books, which actually seem ultra-compatible with newspaper content and are a medium through which readers are already used to paying for what they read.
This is what newspapers need to be hitting harder. Well, that and actual news reporting.