Monday, May 30, 2011

Checking in with the Newport Daily News: Two years after a digital paywall, print is still king

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
The Newport (R.I.) Daily News might have been ahead of its time in offering the Frank Rich discount: The newspaper charges a hefty premium for digital-only access in hopes of boosting print subscriptions.
Two years have passed since the Daily News introduced a three-tiered paywall. At the time, executive editor Sheila Mullowney described the move not as a push toward digital, but as the opposite: a “print-newspaper-first strategy.”
That remains the case today.
“The print product is the thing really driving us at this point,” William Lucey, the Daily News’ publisher, told me. “As far the Internet goes, it really has not amounted to a hill of beans yet from a financial point of view.”
That sentiment is borne out in the Columbia Journalism School’s recent report on the business of digital journalism, which digs into the data:
The paper’s site, newportdailynews.com, gets around 80,000 visitors a month. Especially with online ad rates “dropping 20 percent a year,” that’s not enough to sustain the operation, which includes a newsroom of 22 people, Lucey says. Indeed, online ad revenue accounts for only 2 to 3 percent of total advertising for the paper.
After the change was put into effect, “our single-copy sales went up about 300 a day” — a bit less than 10 percent of overall single-copy sales. As the economy improves, “print is coming back. February [2011] was up 35 percent over last year” in ad sales.
As the Daily News has tweaked its price, it has preserved the print-first ethos. Earlier this year, the paper dropped its print+digital subscription price from $245 a year to $157 — a dollar more than the print-only price. A digital-only subscription, on the other hand, costs $345 a year.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/05/checking-in-with-the-newport-daily-news-two-years-after-a-digital-paywall-print-is-still-king/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=081418b8ca-DAILY_EMAIL&utm_medium=email

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