NEW BEDFORD – The Standard-Times said Monday that starting in January it will charge readers if they want to read more than 10 stories per month on its Web site and other digital devices.
Starting Jan. 12, visitors will be allowed to read a maximum of 10 stories for free each month on SouthCoastToday.com, the paper said in an article. They can read three articles without registering, and then seven more if they fill out a free registration form.
To read more than 10 stories, readers will have to buy a subscription. Although the newspaper said it plans to offer a number of different packages, the only one mentioned in an article about the changes is a subscription that will cost $4.60 per week, or $239.20 per year.
The $4.60 package, described as an “All-Access plan,” will include a seven-day subscription to the print edition of The Standard-Times and full access to the paper’s digital content on all devices, as well as a new electronic replica of the printed paper.
A seven-day print subscription to The Standard-Times currently costs about $4.23 per week, or $220.06 per year, according to its Web site, so the newspaper will only be charging print subscribers 37 cents more per week, or $19.24 per year, to read content on the Internet.
“We understand that making this switch is a sensitive issue to some people,” Standard-Times Publisher Mary Harrington said. But “the business model has changed and we need to change to reflect that. … This shift asks readers to recognize that value irrespective of whether they read the newspaper in print or online.”
The Standard-Times’ weekday circulation fell 10 percent to 26,334 in the six months ended Sept. 30, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The newspaper’s Sunday circulation fell 7 percent to 28,323 and Saturday circulation slid 8 percent to 26,433.
The Standard-Times has had at least three rounds of layoffs since May 2008, according to its sister paper, the Cape Cod Times.
Both newspapers are part of Dow Jones Local Media Group, the former Ottaway Community Newspapers unit of Dow Jones & Co. that News Corp. acquired in 2007. In recent months, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has said he plans to start charging readers for the Web sites of all his newspapers, which also include The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
Harrington said SouthCoastToday.com currently gets more than 20,000 unique visitors per day, and she acknowledged that putting up a pay wall could cut that number.
But she argued that those who continue to visit the site will be more valuable to advertisers, because they will get “a more engaged audience, an audience with an attractive demographic, and they’ll be able to document what online habits are.”
The Providence Journal is planning to begin charging readers for its Web site as soon as next March, Howard G. Sutton, the paper’s chairman, publisher, president and CEO, said last month. The Journal’s weekday circulation fell 19 percent to 106,875 in the six months ended Sept. 30 compared with a year earlier.
The Newport Daily News began charging readers for its Web site last summer. A combined print-online subscription to that paper costs $245 a year.
