When The Times first entered the digital age, many discussions were had concerning how much content should be provided free of charge through the website (fhtimes.com).
Fewer newspapers relied on metered subscription models back then, so that didn’t seem like the best route. At the same time we couldn’t just work for free, so we didn’t want to put the entire newspaper online at no charge.
We settled on the best compromise we could come up with at the time, which was to run a sampling of the week’s stories online alongside any important, breaking events.
That model has served us decently well over the years, but we’ve never felt it served our community as well as it could. So, at long last, we’ve decided to make a change.
As you might have read on page 1A of this week’s paper, The Times is moving its website to a metered model. That’s just a fancy way of saying everyone will have free access to a set number of articles each month and, once that limit is hit, you can continue with unlimited access at a rate of $5 for 30 days.
To be clear, we’re also upping the amount of content available online by a sound margin to make sure everyone has access to all of the news.
We’ve done a lot of research, spoken with our peers and have had this discussion in the background ever since our website went live.
When we first went online, it was determined that the only way to make our website totally free was to basically limit the content. While many of the big news stories make it online each week, you might have noticed that we typically only run a few additional stories for news and individual sections. Again, we couldn’t just give everything away for free.
But what we’ve learned over the years is that many people do not realize that they were only seeing a fraction of the news by visiting fhtimes.com. Folks would check out the website on Wednesday and think, “Well, that’s it for the week.”
Put simply, it became clear that we have not been doing our job of getting all of the news out to the community through all means available to us.
So, moving forward, our website is basically going to explode with content. We’ll roll a handful of stories out per day and, by the end of each week, all of the major news will have been made available through the website. And, of course, we will continue to post breaking stories and other important information as it becomes available.
If you only want to read a few stories at fhtimes.com each month, that’s dandy. But our hope is that folks who prefer to get their news online will agree that all of that information, coming from your hometown crew, is worth the investment.
If you get the paper delivered, pick up a copy at a local store or have a digital subscription, this isn’t going to have an impact on you. For those of you who only get the news through our website, though, now you’ll actually have access to all of it.
As we make this transition, feel free to send any questions or comments my way. We plan on filling in additional details in the coming weeks, with the metered website going live in February.
