Since we went live with a paid news model in October of last year, our headlines have dropped off the Googles and the Yahoos of the world. We heard then and since that this was a major mistake, and certainly for a daily newspaper with a great deal invested in the print world while creating a new one online, this is a venture into the unknown.
One reason we did this is to keep our future in our own hands. As we saw recently, when Google makes a tweak to its search algorithm, business models are turned upside down. We never really completely relied on Google or Yahoo for our online business model, but now we don't at all. We create our own community - which is what small, locally owned businesses do, and we're slower than average to adopt new technology, which is a strategy employed by a lot of Vermont newspapers.
I wrote about this for the Champlain Business Journal earlier this year - many Vermont weeklies and at least three dailies besides us either have a paywall up or post only limited content online. That includes the Valley News, the Caledonian Record, the St. Albans Messenger, the Addison Independent, the Barton Chronicle and the Herald of Randolph. This isn't because they are backwards or resistant to change, it's because locally-owned newspapers have an eye on the long term, and long term means having a solid business model. For some papers, like Seven Days, that means free in print and free online. But newspapers in Vermont are still in a start-up phase for their online business models; most of them have a hybrid - some free, some paid content.
Those business models are built around providing quality, local content, and around making connections between disparate parts of our cities and towns - creating a community.
We also have heard in response to our paywall the call for allowing free linking, more free content, and the ability to connect via social media, and we are close to adapting our web sites to meet that demand, because a paid online model is about quality journalism, but newspapers are also about creating that community.
Meanwhile, the New York Times has announced a new online pay model, and will be requiring subscriptions for those visiting their web site more than 20 times a month, or for use of their mobile and tablet apps.
-Rob Mitchell
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