MediaNews extends paywalls

MediaNews Group today announced that 23 of its paper will go behind digital paywalls - at least part way. The affected papers include two in Southern California, the Whittier Daily News and the Redlands Daily Facts. Print subscribers will be charged $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year for full access; digital-only subscriptions cost $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year.

Under the plan, online home pages, obits and classified ads will remain free. Business, feature, and sport stories go behind the walls. This is an extension of the experiment MediaNews started last year in Chico, California and York, Pennsylvania.

My sense is the papers will depend on prep sports to drive print subscribers to pay a little extra. The papers are also some of the smallest in the MediaNews universe.

Here's how MediaNews is selling the paywall:

Our new digital business model reflects the high value we place on professional journalism and helps us to fund our local reporting at a time of unprecedented change in the way people use and consume news and information.

The paywall debuts at the New York Times

In a letter to readers, New York Times Arthur Sulzberger Jr. explains the newspaper's paywall system, which launches today in Canada and will come to the U.S. and the rest of the world March 28.

 Boiled down, readers who pay for home delivery of the paper will have access to everything. Browsing front pages online remains free. Online readers can open 20 stories a month for free - after that, they will be prompted to become a digital subscriber (plans and pricing are here). Different points of access - smartphone app, tablet app, the words - come at different prices. Then there's this interesting tidbit:

Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles. 

This will ensure that other news outlets and aggregaters will continue to link to Times articles and give the paper the free publicity that comes from that. Of course, intensive aggregaters will be forced to pay for the plus-20 access.

The strategy obviously is to push people who read the Times frequently to subscribe. Casual readers will still see the articles for free. Will it work? If it does, expect to see a similar model come to a paper near you.

Four today

1. Hello walls. The Belo-owned Dallas Morning News is charging for online content: Newsonomics; The New York Times is set to launch it's own paywall: MarketWatch; and Gannett now wants to charge, too: Bloomberg

2. James Fallows embraces inevitability. Atlantic

3. A way to rescue investigative pieces from stagnation? Nieman Journalism Lab

4. Actor seeks intern to help with new job hunt. Internships

Four in the morning

1. Utah wants to limit the pesky public from making requests for public documents. Poynter

2. Huffington Post names six new reporters, including former Yahoo-er Michael Calderon. Romenesko; Arianna Huffington says "meh" to the threat of unpaid bloggers going on strike (i.e., some people doing free work deciding not to work for free). fishbowlLA

3. Most media outlets are the worst at covering themselves - still, the New York Times ombud says it's about time the paper did some reporting on its highly anticipated paywall plan. NYT

4. For those living and voting in Los Angeles, the city will suspend parking restrictions on Election Day. City Maven (found via LA Observed)

Singleton: "the news side is my real passion"

Westword has a lengthy interview with Dean Singleton, who cites health issues and his age as the reason he decided to step down CEO of MediaNews Group. Singleton will stay on as executive chairman of the company and serve as publisher of the Denver Post and Salt Lake Tribune.

The interview offers hints about what's next for MediaNews. Consolidation, of course, is on the agenda. Singleton couches the consolidation plans in talk of expansion, which would indicate that mergers with are on the horizon too add to company's properties, since even he can't spin shrinking as a form of growth.

He also talks about mobile and social media strategies, which MediaNews has been working on some time. And Singleton offers a more cautious view of pay walls than I've read before:

"We're experimenting with pay walls, but there's no certainty pay walls are going to work," he concedes. "The best reason to have a pay wall is that it sends a message to consumers that all information is not free. And I think having sent the message for fifteen years that it is, we need to send a different message -- that all information isn't free. Although you can't have a total pay wall, because we're generating a lot of traffic, and a lot of revenue, for the content we have."

MediaNews has already outlined a strategy where features, sports and some user-generated content would go behind pay walls, with breaking news still free. But the statement above, along with the desire to merge operations with other papers, makes me wonder if MediaNews wants to limit pay walls to niche content, such as Politico has done with its Politico Pro.

Then there is Singleton's homage to news, a sentiment most people who work (or worked) on the news side would have liked to have seen in practice when he was wielding the axe:

"Newspapering is my primary love, and the news side is my real passion. Having been a CEO for 27 years at MediaNews and for eight years prior to that for another company that I didn't own, I've been a newspaper CEO for 35 years. And I've been very much a businessman, because that's what you have to do to build a company. I love the business side of newspapering, no question. But my first love is and always has been the news side. And I don't have any intentions of drawing a breath of life outside of newspapering."

A nice career epitaph. I'm not sure it will stick.

Singleton hires muscle to enforce intellectual property rights

Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group has hired a Las Vegas firm to file legal challenges against what the newspaper company defines as copyright infringement. Wired magazine reports:

Las Vegas–based Righthaven was formed this spring for the sole purpose of acquiring copyrights and suing to financially benefit from allegedly misappropriated intellectual property. It has filed more than 180 suits on behalf of Stephens Media’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, and has now begun suing on behalf of Denver-based MediaNews Group, which owns the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post and about two dozen other outlets.

Righthaven’s initial lawsuit on behalf of the Denver Post, first reported by the Las Vegas Sun, came three weeks after the paper published online a “notice to readers about Denver Post copyright protections.” The five-paragraph notice said the newspaper’s work “is illegally reproduced everyday on websites across the country.” The company wrote it was acceptable for blogs to “reproduce no more than a headline and up to a couple of paragraphs or summary of the story.”

The crackdown promises to get more aggressive as MediaNews prepares to build paywalls around its newspaper sites.

Four in the morning

1. Carlotta Gall of the New York Times recounts the day photographer Joao Silva stepped on a land mine. NYT

2. The Financial Times, which is behind a paywall, writes that the Telegraph in London also plans to go behind a paywall, starting next year. Looks like the British are going first. FT

3. The New York Times will now let you set a permalink at the paragraph level. Scripting

4. Columnist and satirist Tina Dupuy is looking to get into a fight with the combative Sarah Palin. TD

Wall extensions at the Daily Journal*, **

The Los Angeles/San Francisco Daily Journal is a model for niche trade publications that want to make money off subscriptions. The legal newspapers is profitable and has a captive audience of judges, lawyers, lobbyists and politicians who want and need to follow the legal industry and its players. A subscription costs a bit more than $700 a year, and the owners have little if any interest in letting cracks appear in the pay wall.

Indeed, as LA Observed learned today, in a memo from Daily Journal editor David Houston, the paper is re-enforcing its walls to make content even more exclusive. From the memo:

I hope you have had a chance to check out our updated website. We're still ironing out kinks so let me know if you see anything funky.

Subscribers are no longer able to email a story. We are also no longer sending out a daily headlines email. If you get calls about this refer them to me.

As a former writer at the Daily Journal and now a producer at a public radio show that often turns to reporters as guests, I can attest to the fact that the pay wall keeps a lot of good work out of the general public's eye. Whether these strict policies are needed to keep the paper in the black, I cannot say, but I've always wondered why the paper doesn't offer a summary of articles to ensure its good work gets noticed.

*The redesigned website seems to emphasize profiles, with news updates on the right (with news about subscriptions leading today's stories). Here's a screen grab:

**Noted: The screen grab shows the website as non-subscribers see it. Only those paying the money can see the layout that includes actual headlines and article summaries. I'm told they continue to get prominent play inside the walls.

Belo building walls

The Dallas Morning News plans to put stories written by the staff or about the Dallas Cowboys behind a paywall. Wire service copy and stories less than 150 words would be available for free on the newspaper's website, according to News Tech. From the story:

Seven-day-a-week print subscribers will still be able to see all of dallasnews.com's content free of charge. The Morning News charges new subscribers up to $33.95 per month for home delivery, and $37.95 for mail delivery, among the industry's steepest subscription rates for a general-circulation daily.

The Morning News is owned by Belo, which also owns the Press-Enterprise in Riverside. It would seem logical that if the paywall succeeds in Dallas that something similar would be erected out here.

Building walls around Time

Online readers will now only see abridged articles on the Time magazine website, unless they have a subscription of the iPad app, Peter Kafka at All Things Digital reports. Kafka doesn't think much of the paywall strategy:

Nearly every magazine publisher with a substantial Web site swears that their online audience is different than their print readers. And their sites are certainly designed that way: They’re supposed to attract twitchy Web surfers who want to read about something that happened today, not seven days ago.


So if that’s the case, what the’s real downside in keeping the magazine stuff free? Maybe that online/offline split isn’t as real as we’ve been told.

Four today

1. Dan Gillmor says the press needed to say "torture" more. Salon

2. Paywalls won't pay, according to Clay Shirky. Guardian

3. Public radio on the web. Nieman Journalism Lab

4. The L.A. Times goes app happy. Press release

MediaNews to start building walls

Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group will begin its experiment with paywalls sometime next month, the industry trade publication News and Tech reports.

From the story:

The publisher will use the Enterprise Record in Chico, Calif., and the York (Pa.) Daily Record and York Dispatch to evaluate paywalls, according to David Bessen, IT director and Howard Saltz, editorial director, at MediaNews Group Interactive. ...

MNG is calling its model "member zones." Consumers will be able to read up to 10 stories for free each month before they are asked to begin paying for access.

More details to come.

MediaNews paywall, coming soon

BusinessWeek has a reminder article that MediaNews Group plans to start charging for some content. The paywalls go up in May at papers in Chico, California and York, Pennsylvania.

NYT confirms its coming paywall

The New York Times confirmed today that it will begin charging some readers for access to its website. From the Times:

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.

But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand.

Building walls

Despite Jeff Jarvis's incessant pleading, the New York Times plans to start charging for online content. The Times will follow the model of the Financial Times in which readers will get a certain number of stories free and then start getting charged.

Once the New York Times puts up pay walls, many smaller papers will consider doing the same. Given the number of bankruptcies, layoffs, consolidations and death spirals in the industry it's very likely that the smaller papers are ready to experiment sooner than later.

Whether this signals a wholesale shift from free content to pay content will depend more on what entertainment sites do.

Away from Google

The Associated Press provides more details about a proposal by at least three newspaper companies - News Corp., MediaNews Group and A.H. Belo - to pull some of their content from Google's search engine in favor of an exclusive partnership with Microsoft's Bing.

From AP:

In theory, getting news organizations to block Google from including links to their content might give Microsoft a slight edge over its nemesis. Bing would have a trove of material that its rival didn't, giving people more reason to search somewhere besides Google. Google handles more than six times as many Web searches as Bing, a lead that Google has translated into billions of dollars in annual revenue from ads that the company sells alongside search results.

But even if it were willing to pay for exclusive indexing rights to some newspapers, Microsoft then would have to spend heavily to make sure Web surfers knew Bing had stuff that Google didn't — and even that might not be enough to get people to break their Google habit, said Forrester Research analyst Shar VanBoskirk.

Dan Kennedy at Media Nation offers his take on the plan:

...there isn’t really any underlying principle as to who ought to pay for what online. Rather, the debate is driven by who’s making money, who’s losing money and — here’s where we get back to Microsoft — the business model of any particular Internet company.

What is Microsoft’s business interest with respect to Bing? Simply this: to build market share, establishing Bing as a serious search alternative to Google. Bing has a long way to go, with 10 percent of the market to Google’s 65 percent. That said, Bing has received good reviews since its debut earlier this year. And it’s really the only search engine to emerge as any kind of rival to Google pretty much since Google slipped into view in the late 1990s.

MediaNews, Belo want to block Google, too

MediaNews Group owner Dean Singleton said he will follow the lead of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and block Google News from linking to stories that are put behind pay walls, Bloomberg reported today. MediaNews plans to start charging for some content at papers in Chico, California and York, Pennsylvania, and Singleton said that content would be off limits.

From Bloomberg:

“The things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic,” Singleton said.

Belo, which owns the Riverside Press-Enterprise, also announced tentative plans to charge for some online content and said it would likewise block Google from indexing those stories.

Microsoft, News Corp to challenge Google

The Financial Times reports that Microsoft and News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal, have joined together to challenge the dominance of Google as an aggregator of online news content.

From the FT:

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

...the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.

...the biggest beneficiary of the tussle could be the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct a reliable online business model that adequately replaces declining print and advertising revenues.

The Wall Street Journal has long held the line against giving away all of its online content for free. Meantime, Microsoft's Bing search engine has looked for ways to compete with Google. For its part, Google told FT that newspaper content doesn't account for much online revenue. But how many more people might think "Bing" when they first sign on the Internet in the morning to look for the news (depending, of course, on how many papers follow News Corp's lead)?

Hello walls

For a while now Dean Singleton has been threatening to put up pay walls at some or all of his newspapers. Today, Editor and Publisher reports that Singleton's MediaNews Group will test out a pay-for-content model on the websites of the Enterprise-Record in Chico, California and the York Daily Record in York, Pennsylvania:

"We wanted to get sites that were not metro sites for the same reason that you don't open on Broadway," said Howard Saltz, vice president for content development. "But not a site that has Web traffic so small that the change would not affect anything."

So when do they get to Broadway?

Saltz said more sites, including MediaNews Group's larger papers such as The Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News, would likely add a pay wall approach if the York and Chico efforts prove successful: "We are going to be rolling out for the next two years."

The walls will go up sometime early next year. The Singleton plan calls for putting some content behind a pay wall - maybe news features, sports and some reader-generated content - and keeping the breaking news free.

Given that most of his staffs are stretched thin, it will be interesting to see whether the pay walls lead to new hires for money-making beats.

Crazy, mixed up world

The downturn in newspapers has been so prolonged and pervasive that Dean Singleton, once derided as "Lean Dean" for his gut-and-consolidate strategy, has become spirit raiser.

From a story that ran yesterday CJR:

And the mood of the writers rose—briefly, at least—when Dean Singleton, whose MediaNews Group owns both The Salt Lake Tribune and The Denver Post, recounted the conclusions that his top executives reached following a three-day planning session at his Colorado ranch: Instead of continuing to provide free of charge all the contents of its newspapers on their Web sites, the group’s papers would provide breaking news online for free, but reserve many of the newspapers’ in-depth and analytical stories for paid subscribers. In three to five years, he predicted, the newspaper business will be a combination of “print, online, wireless mobile and niche products.” The business “will be better than it is today, although not as good as it was yesterday.”

I think many reporters at Singleton papers would welcome such a plan, as long as it meant investing in newsrooms so that they could produce sufficient in-depth and analytical stories to justify the charge.