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Media Scope
Vindy.Com Takes Paid PlungemidApril Issue 2004No one expects to consume the products your company produces for free. But if you're in the newspaper business and you post news on the Internet, online readers believe it is their right to consume news for free. All of which leads us to The Vindicator's gutsy plunge, some might say over the cliff, to convert its Web site to paid content. The change took place last week. Readers still can read the same small number of daily news stories and not pay for access, but you cannot search the newspaper's five-year archives for free (a real bummer for rival news organizations) nor can you read recaps of last night's ballgames. Where the cliff looms is the paper's insistence that readers who pay for its print editions (daily and Sunday costs $117 per year) also must pay a minimum of $5.05 per month to read its premium online product.This push of the pay envelope is justified by providing full online access to all four daily editions of The Vindicator, says Jason Holmes, the newspaper's director of new media. "There may be 10 pages different in every edition, and ads are zoned for specific editions," he explains. "We start updating our Web site at 9:30 [a.m.] Ð our goal is to have the first edition available at 9:45. The newspaper just begins going out at that time Ð it hasn't made it to the rack yet. And the copy you buy in the box isn't necessarily the same editions you will have access to at the Web site." If you don't subscribe to The Vindicator, online access to the full replica editions costs $10 per month. This rate is good if you're a snowbird and subscribe from Florida via mail ($24.43 per month). Indeed, snowbirds and former residents of the Mahoning Valley who keep up with local news via mail subscriptions are top targets for a soon-to-be-launched Vindy.Com marketing campaign, Holmes says. "We know that 35% of our overall Web site traffic is from out of the state," he notes. "We get requests nearly every day to offer an online subscription product, so it was a no-brainer for us to pick up subscribers from outside the area."Holmes says other papers that converted to paid Web content get online subscriptions "as high as 2% of their core circulation product." The Vindy's daily circulation is "around 70,000 and Sunday circulation around 100,000," he says. "It wouldn't surprise me to see 1,500 online subscriptions by the end of the year."Within the first 24 hours of launching paid premium content, 20 subscriptions were sold, he says. Of that total, "25% lived in Mahoning County and 75% of them were adding on to print subscriptions."One online reader who won't be paying for full access is "Lewis," who vented anonymously at the Vindy.com reader forum. "If I was able to pay, I would just subscribe to the paper delivery, which I am not able to do as I am on disability and do not have the funds to do so," he wrote. "I would like to know what caused you to start charging." The Vindicator, like every newspaper -- including The Business Journal -- has to harness the dollars of online readers to rein in news-gathering costs for its print editions. Put another way, the Internet is journalism's greatest growth sector and its biggest threat. So finds a newly released 500-page academic study that concludes American journalism is in the middle of an epochal transformation as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television." The study, "The State of the News Media 2004," was conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism at Columbia University. It concludes, "While journalism online appears to represent opportunity for old media rather than simply cannibalization, the bigger issue may be financial. If online proves to be a less useful medium for subscription fees or advertising, will it provide as strong an economic foundation for newsgathering as television and newspapers have? If not, the move to the Web may lead to a general decline in the scope and quality of American journalism, not because the medium isn't suited for news, but because it isn't suited to the kind of profits that underwrite newsgathering."