Houston Chronicle

The Houston Chronicle is adopting a new payment model for digital content: Its new HTML5 site, HoustonChronicle.com, requires a subscription, while a separate site, Chron.com, remains free. The Boston Globe enacted a similar model last September.

John T. O’Loughlin, president of the Houston Chronicle Media Group, explained the new system in a letter to readers:

The new site is a complement to Chron.com, not a replacement. On Chron.com, you’ll find information on breaking news, weather, traffic, pop culture and news-to-use, such as events listings and city guides. HoustonChronicle.com will offer deep analysis, enterprise reporting, exclusive photos, and the work of your favorite columnists in business, sports, education, city and state government, and arts and culture, plus everything found in your daily newspaper.

The newspaper is also launching the “Star Access Membership Program,” which is available to anyone who pays for HoustonChronicle.com. The membership includes benefits like a digital replica of the newspaper and “privileges at signature Houston Chronicle events,” discounts and special deals and giveaways.

Digital access starts at $9.95 per month. Any home delivery subscribers who already pay at least that amount per month automatically receive “Star Access,” or they can pay the difference to receive access.

Crain’s New York

Crain’s New York Business will add a metered paywall at crainsnewyork.com starting on December 10, 2012. Visitors can read up to ten articles free per month; after that, they must pay $57 a year for a digital subscription or $67 a year for a print-plus-digital subscription. Current print subscribers already have free digital access. The new model “satisfies the heavy website user’s need for deeper Crain’s content while leaving lighter users’ access to the site unaffected,” Jill Kaplan, VP and publisher, said.

Newsweek

Last month, Newsweek announced that it is going online-only; the magazine’s last print issue will be published on December 31, 2012. The new online edition, Newsweek Global, will require a subscription. In an interview with New York magazine, Newsweek and Daily Beast editor-in-chief Tina Brown said, “We’re looking very strongly now at this metered-access model…when you charge for every fourth or fifth piece that you get.”

The move appeared to be inevitable after recent sensationalist covers failed to stave off a collapse in Newsweek’s business. As David Carr reports, the magazine is slated to lose $40 million this year and has seen its subscribers fall from 3 million to 1.5 million in the last decade. More broadly, the company faced a more existential problem in that a “weekly news” magazine has become an anachronism in the digital world.

In this morning’s announcement, Brown wrote that the tablet edition will target a “new highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context.” The product will be subscription based and supplemented with content from The Daily Beast, which took over Newsweek’s online brand in 2010. The relationship between the publications has been complicated since they were first mashed together in an odd 50-50 partnership.  As we reported in 2010, Brown appeared to face an insurmountable task of combining a tired magazine brand with The Daily Beast which itself was losing $10 million a year.

It’s early days, of course, but Newsweek Global appears to face an uphill battle for that coveted “mobile, opinion-leading audience.” These readers are already receiving intense attention from the likes of the Economist and The Atlantic, two publications whose brands, unlike Newsweek, have retained their sheen in the digital era. Meanwhile, other tablet-only plays like The Daily have floundered. Is it realistic for a reborn digital Newsweek to muscle into this space?

Finally, here are some reactions from around the media sphere:

End of print Newsweek may improve its journalism. Desperate newsstand covers were shameful, pandering sensationalism. No more #muslimrage?

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) October 18, 2012

In July, Tina Brown tried to knock down web-only rumors in a memo with the subject line “Scaremongering.” bit.ly/U8Irgc

— Romenesko (@romenesko) October 18, 2012

When I die, I want my obituary to say that I “transitioned to an all-digital format”.

— felix salmon (@felixsalmon) October 18, 2012

The full video, embedded below. The full videos from the conference are here on YouTube.

More, including a full-page screen shot, after the jump.

Don’t squint looking for advertising. There is none. Brown explains: “At this point, in this first phase, we’re only focusing on the content and building the audience.” But the business model is advertising and GM Caroline Marks stresses that it’s a business unit for IAC. Brown, Marks and Edward Felsenthal, the former WSJ deputy managing editor who has been working with Brown from the beginning, talked me through a front page of The Daily Beast as they prepared for the launch but the actual site wasn’t available for a preview. I can’t yet say whether the content measures up but at first look, The Daily Beast reflects Brown’s experience as editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Tatler and founder/editor of short-lived Talk: culture mixed with news of the day, quick hits and deeper dives, bold-faced names blended with writers known and not-so-known.

Why would The Daily Beast have a chance?: Brown: “The great thing about the web is that a sensibility is what people are really looking for as they’re choosing how they read things, There are obviously many, many places you can get news and many, many places you can get opinion and many, many places you can get cultural coverage. What I’ve always tried to do with the magazines I’ve edited is my sensibility responding to the zeitgeist out there and picking what I think’s interesting. I’ve come to feel word of mouth is reshaping media and culture and we’re building a site where the rationale is word of mouth, the word of mouth of people we feel are interesting and feel have something to say and offer and know something. … There are other places where you can get aggregation, sure, but ultimately this will work — or not — depending on whether you like the sensibility of the people choosing it.”

Original content: Roughly 30 percent of the content will be original, including daily posts by Brown, who is listed as a blogger. When I asked if she was really going to blog, she played it down: “I’m going to be writing regularly for the site. I’m not going to be writing all day every day … but I certainly will be coming into the site pretty much with something to say even if it’s not anything of great length.” She’s planning a weekly column and “commenting” throughout the week. One quick-hit way to get top names up there: the Buzz Board featuring what “smart people recommend” and led by Bill Clinton on launch day recommending “three bailout-related books.” Brown describes it as “really a great way of tapping into the word of mouth of some of the interesting minds out there so they in a way become part of our curation of what’s interesting.”

The look: Brown: “I’ve always loved the look of the European smart tabloids — La Republica., El Pais … There ‘s a lot to be said for the sex appeal of the tabloid flavor but then incorporating into that really terrific writing and good thinking. In some ways, it’s that high-low mix that I’ve liked to do at Vanity Fair and everywhere I’ve gone really, where the visual presentation is exciting and enticing and the content is smart and well-written and upscale.”

Soft launch: Development truly got underway in July and the plan all along has been to use the soft launch as another stage in that. Felsenthal: “We’ve designed it explicitly as a soft launch so we’re up. The future evolution of the site is, we hope, going to be informed by user experiences and user feedback and as we hopefully build out our content and our traffic we’ll hopefully move to the next phases.” In a way, it’s the web equivalent of the magazine prototype, only less expensive to produce and far more nimble. Marks puts it another way: “From a product perspective, we kind of treat ourselves more like software. We really plan to have an agile development process that reacts to the way our users use the content.”

Web over print: Brown: “I so much prefer it. There’s nothing like actually doing something to learning exactly how it should go. One of the great agonies of magazines is it takes so damn long. It just takes forever to get a magazine out and, once it is out, I remember with monthlies, you’d publish your first issue and almost within hours of getting it out and the first response, you knew exactly how you wanted to tweak it and do things and change it and make it different and better but you were already halfway to press with the next issue so it was really sort of three months before you could change it. What I’m loving about this is we’re actually able to build it fast and get the response and weave that into our evolution. It’s very exciting. It’s thrilling.”

Revenue and traffic: Marks: “We’re planning to syndicate all of our content. We’re looking at doing some aggressive traffic deals so that we can build an audience.” As for the advertising trajectory, “This is a business unit for IAC but it’s also nice to be a start-up within a corporate environment. There’s no question, notwithstanding the downturn, that online advertising is still growing faster than other media … “

The name: It’s an inside joke for the lit set familiar with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop . Do people get it? Brown: “Some people get it and some people don’t but that was the whole point. I realized when I chose it, it was a little bit of an in joke to the few members of the literary circle who would remember that novel ..,. but at the same time, it also has a lot of vigor and energy to it, which is what I liked,”

Portfolio ran the traps and reports that the domains thedailybeast.com and dailybeast.com are owned by someone named James Moy, who is auctioning them off with other domains. The registration from a Forrest Hills, NY address was set up in 2005.

Update: I’m told by someone who should know that both urls are held by IAC. On another note, I’ve been chided a bit for singling out The Daily Beast as a title, especially given the plethora of brands built on names considered nonsensical before they became successful and, in the process, created their own meaning. Talk had an easily understood name, tons of money behind it and the splashiest of launches — and wound up silent. This one will work if, like Vanity Fair, an identity can be created that stands apart from its literary predecessor and stands for a product enough people want.

Radar highlights a recent NYT item on the Huffington Post’s estimated $200 million, but Brown doesn’t take the bait, insisting that she’s not trying to compete with the left-leaning news site.

– Joseph adds: A source familiar with the project says it’s not a Diller project per se, but an IAC (NSDQ: IACI) venture. Consistent with Brown’s insistence that she’s not going after the Huffington Post, we’re told the venture will not produce original content, but will consist of hand-selected links to outside posts, much of it with a cultural focus. Early versions of the site have experimented with links displayed on a map and on a chart, somewhat similar to New York magazine’s “Approval Matrix,” which places events from the week on a grid based on the editors’ tastes (see an example here).

Also, for some perspective on the company’s successes with recent launches, check out FiLife.com, the personal finance JV it launched with Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS) last year. It’s exactly where it was when it quietly launched last August — it’s just a finance blog with one post every few days. We’re not sure exactly what the status of it is, but one of its editors, Ron Lieber, recently left to write a finance column at the New York Times (NYSE: NYT). Also, as Radar notes, the company’s homegrown comedy site 23/6, (tagline: Some Of The News, Most Of The Time), a JV with the Huffington Post, doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact — though at least it appears to have fresh content.