In the mid-90s, at least 45 U.S. newspapers charged for online access, though almost all of them later hopped over the fence to the free side. Now, the paywall brigade is rising again — albeit slowly. On the eve of this year’s American Society of News Editors conference, where the question of charging for digital content will be center stage, we’ve assembled a list of the local and metro papers in the U.S. that have paywalls. We found more than 20 that charge online readers up to $35 a month, in an attempt either to preserve their print circulation or to add a new stream of revenue. They range from major metros like Newsday to sub-20,000 circulation papers in small northeast towns that have charged online readers for years.
And this list is about to get longer. At least six other papers have announced they will put up some sort of online paywall in the coming months. How these papers do financially with their new paywalls will determine, in part, whether hundreds of other papers decide to take the same step. As a result, we’ll be updating this list periodically with new entrants and checking with these papers to see how they’re faring. We aimed for comprehensiveness, but our list is certainly missing papers that have paywalls and is missing some details too — so please help us out and send us the names of others that aren’t here, via the comments at the end of this story, and we’ll update. Click on the thumbnail below to see the full chart.
Here’s another one for your list:
Santa Barbara News-Press
http://www.newspress.com/
yeah add the Santa Barbara News Press and the Laredo Texas paper as well
The Valley News in Lebanon, NH charges for all but the lead stories. http://www.vnews.com
All of those trivial little papers with all those delusions.
Keep charging and then swirl down the drain further. I’ll get my news from Drudge.
I don’t have a problem with charging as long as the information itself is worth the cost of admission, and 90% of the time, it’s not. 90% of the time it’s just old media fools trying to save their backsides without having a product that’s worth paying for. The WSJ, on the other hand, has earned the right to charge. They provide a lot of free high-quality content which motivates you to pay for the rest. Other newspapers would do well to provide similarly compelling content.
Your chart is wrong you are dividing yearly subscriptions by 52 and showing them as monthly values.
Thanks for catching that. I changed the price of two of the papers — Mount Washington Valley and Martha’s Virginia Gazette.
– Joe Tartakoff, paidContent.org
There is by no means any ‘success story(ies)’ here. This is further evidence that the paid subscription model “just don’t work”.
I work at the Oil City Derrick (www.thederrick.com) and we started a paywall in Nov. 09. We have a printed circ of 28,000 and 1193 online only subscribers.
The paywall strategy they was taken here is not one that I would have done (i.e. all content, even AP behind the wall) but considering some of the numbers in the chart I don’t think that we are doing all that badly.
Personally I would have done something more blended and added more features for the subscribers. Still working on that though