Sporting News Today’s Paid Cross-Platform Digital Starts April 1
More details on the The Sporting News switch from free to paid for its digital daily Sporting News Today, which was first announced by Publisher Jeff Price at our paidContent2010 conference last month. The Sporting News is partnering with its current digital publisher Zinio for the April 1 launch. A monthly subscription runs $2.99 and, unlike most publications, covers access on any platform or device Zinio and Sporting News offer including PC, Mac, and yes, even iPad. New features include video highlights from CineSport. The new edition kicks off with a 60-day free trial so it will take a while to see what kind of traction the pay strategy gets. You can hear Price’s rationale for the move in the video below.
I’ll let you know my reaction to the pay model when the April 1 issue lands in my email account. As of 10:24 am Eastern, no issue. Used to get it quite early in the morning when it was free.
Terrible start, so far, for Sporting News Today. SNT had to resend a link for Zinio, which I already receive a publication through. Once I navigate to my library, I find the March 31 issue of Sporting News Today, or is it Sporting News YESTERDAY. It’s 11:22 Eastern and I am giving up hope of anybody being able to replicate what SNT used to do before it went behind the pay wall, and that is deliver a publication on time in the morning. No indication yet that will happen, which means there is no indication yet that I will commit my money to this publication.
I will not pay for this. The only reason I subscribed is because it was free. I can get information from other sites online for free. I cancelled my subscription to the regular magazine when they went to the new format. I will now be done with the Sporting news for good!
It is appropriate that The Sporting News Today laid the news to us on April 1, fools day, “hey you are going to have to pony up the bucks to read our previously free site now” Take a hike Sporting News, I am done with you!
Sporting News Today was too good to last as a freebie. I won’t pay for it, either. Too bad magazine subscribers don’t get it free as I am one of those. Far as I’m concerned, the mag is way better than Sports Illustrated or the ADHD ESPN mag.
I absolutely loved the old format. The new format is slow and hard to read. The old format allowed you to preview the page before zooming in. The new format is too small to read without zooming in. There is no way I’ll pay for it.
Why did they need to change the format? I would have happily paid for the old version, but this new one arrives much later in the day (no longer in time for lunch), takes twice as long to load, is slow and choppy to navigate (and doesn’t even WORK on Firefox – the clickable page links in the text just invoke the zoom function), is harder to read (the zoom resets itself after each page turn and there’s a weird blurring effect right down the centre of each “pair of pages”, as if the spine was creased when it was scanned, except that makes no sense)… Really a very poor show all round.
This change is a complete disaster. As stated above, it no longer works on firefox and clicking on a page link either freezes it up or zooms the current page. I’m not sure why people who subscribe to the magazine have to pay for this format. Baseball America doesn’t do that. If you subscribe to the print version, you have access to all premium internet content. Getting zinio involved has lowered the quality of the product. I’m not paying for something that is not as good as the previously free version was. Bad decision Sporting News to treat your loyal customers so shabbily. I’ll just go to espn.com instead.