Shaun Higgins, who directs digital operations at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., watches with bemusement as the newspaper industry tiptoes into experiments with limited pay walls.
His paper has had a system in place for roughly five years that offers 90 percent of website content for free but fences off the other 10 percent for especially motivated audiences willing to pay. In essence it delivers the results The New York Times and others are aiming for in developing a so-called “metered model” – but without the meter.
What’s more, Higgins told me in a phone interview, the family-owned daily has tinkered with paid digital since 1982, when he set up a primitive dial-up service, originally priced at $20 a month.
That evolved to what Higgins describes as a “porous wall” that essentially allows a well-trafficked free site to flourish with a few paid niche options.
Ryan Pitts, who oversees site design and editing, walked me through the long list of what’s free. First, there is local breaking news, a top audience driver that could easily be lost to TV station sites and other competitors were it put behind a wall. In addition, the free site offers a sampler of several of the day’s top stories from the print edition — plus a full portion of electronic classifieds.
What goes behind the pay wall is a group of local enterprise stories by Spokesman-Review reporters. Inbound clicks from search or aggregation sites bypass the wall.
The result is an attractive site with plenty of content (it has won several national awards) and no particular evidence that something is missing.
Nor is there a conspicuous pitch to subscribe. A reader who alternates between print and online would figure out that there are holes in the online version, and a heavy user would bump into the pay wall. Those heavy online users are candidates for a $7.95 monthly online-only subscription; print subscribers get full access for free if they register.
Both Pitts and Higgins said that The Spokesman-Review put the system in place to protect print circulation. Higgins said he had seen an internal Knight-Ridder study in the late 1990s showing that a completely free site would result in a 2 percent shift annually of readers from print to online — “and that’s exactly what we were experiencing.”
With the limited pay wall, print circulation has continued to fall, but he believes at a slower rate than it might have otherwise.
Online traffic has stayed robust, Higgins said, and Spokesman.com was fourth-best in a Newspaper Association of America study of combined print and online audience growth from March 2009 to March 2010. The website had 355,000 unique visitors in June, he said, and its most recent paid print circulation numbers were 76,000 daily and 96,000 Sunday.
Like a number of industry analysts I have spoken with recently, Higgins sees a business model in which news and special, online-only features (like a columnist singing his song parodies) is used to draw an audience. Once on the site, users can then buy archived articles, click on contextual ads and search local business listings. So the site essentially acts as a free marketing tool that can be used to pitch an assortment of products.
Higgins said The Spokesman-Review is pushing replica e-editions as well, whose circulation he hopes will grow to 2,000 by year’s end. Part of the audience simply wants to read the news online, but wants it in a print layout format. The company discovered that there were commercial users as well, such as lawyers who wanted a traditional story format to reproduce for clips.
That led to putting digital archives behind the pay wall too, and he said Spokesman.com has developed a good business (in the mid-five figures) that relies primarily on researchers or others who want the old articles for commercial purposes. In the near future, Higgins sees more direct marketing of coupon/deal offers or transactions.
Also in the works, he said, are plans to take a little more behind the pay wall: “It will be higher, but we are only going to add a row of bricks at a time.”
Higgins said he took a lesson from the paper’s pioneering (but not especially successful) efforts at a digital product back in the 1980s. Access and navigation were slow, security of payment information was shaky, and buyers ended up with a long list of local and AP stories that they had to scroll through. Nonetheless, it attracted a small core of users (ultimately about 160) and they remained loyal subscribers for years.
Also, by maintaining some paid online presence, even if little more than a placeholder, Higgins said, the paper was telling its audience that some news online had value. Now, with its “porous wall” in place since 2005, he said, The Spokesman-Review “doesn’t have to re-establish that it is worth paying for” — unlike other newspaper organizations now launching paid experiments.
With that perspective, Higgins said, he “just hated the paid versus free debate” that was raging last year – since the obvious answer for newspapers was a hybrid formula. He is not especially familiar with the payment system menu Journalism Online is offering, since The Spokesman-Review built its own, with some help from vendors, years ago.
Within the industry, newspapers are exploring a range of paid digital options. The New York Times’ planned “metered model,” requiring the heaviest users to pay for a monthly pass after a number of free articles, is close to Spokane philosophy. Gannett and MediaNews are experimenting with more restrictive pay options, but in only a few of their many markets, mostly without significant TV competition.
At the extreme, Rupert Murdoch’s Times (in London) and Sunday Times have just implemented a hard and tall pay wall, blocking even search traffic. Early reports show a drastic drop in online traffic and apparent defections to the rival Telegraph.
More experiments are on the way, and the results for those just implemented, are 6 to 18 months away. I think many of the experimenters may find their way back to where the Spokesman-Review is already.
August 3, 2010
source: poynter.org