Mary Harrington is publisher of The Standard-Times of New Bedford and its Web site, SouthCoastToday.com, which began charging readers for online content this week. The paper, which is part by News Corp.’s Dow Jones Local Media Group unit, has a weekday circulation of 26,334. Harrington talked with Providence Business News about why the paper decided to charge for its site.
PBN: Everyone in the newspaper business is talking about charging online. What made you decide to take the plunge?
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HARRINGTON: We thought this decision through very carefully, and it rests soundly on the high value in which our local content is held in our communities here on the South Coast. This shift now asks readers to understand that our pricing needs to reflect what we are really providing – and want to continue to provide – to our region.
Current subscription pricing reflects only that we are producing newspapers. But the world has changed and we have changed with it: We are actually, day in and day out, week in and week out, financing the creation of high-quality unique local content and distributing it in a multitude of specialized ways beyond print: in a searchable online format at SouthCoastToday.com, in e-mail newsletters, in text alerts, in mobile formats, podcasts, videos, audio slide shows, blogs and – as of Jan. 12 – in an electronic edition that replicates the printed pages of the paper and is completely searchable as well.
PBN: You’ve heard the arguments against charging for news online — there is already too much content available for free on the Internet to get people to pay; you will not be able to win a new audience; etc. What do you make of those arguments?
HARRINGTON: A recent professional marketing survey confirms that SouthCoastToday.com is the dominant, go-to Web site for our region; no other local news source has the depth of coverage of news we have for our area. That means our existing customers are in the best position to recognize the value of that uniquely local content, and will want to support efforts to continue to have it delivered – in print and online.
Anecdotally, confirmation of that came Dec. 21, the day we made this pre-registration announcement, when one SouthCoastToday.com reader (also a print subscriber) wrote that she had just relied on our site the night before to find out if her children would have school the day after the weekend storm. “Which started me thinking,” she wrote in an e-mail, “if you are that important to us, the least we could do is pay you for it.”
As for our highly engaged online-only audience who may not be print readers, those users will want and need to access all of the content on SouthCoastToday.com and experience the new e-edition as well.
PBN: Could you explain the thinking behind the pricing structure you chose? For example, why does it cost 20 cents more to subscribe online than to the print edition?
HARRINGTON: Our online-only subscription package consists of both an electronic replica of our award-winning daily newspaper, the new eStandard-Times, and our own SouthCoastToday.com, a multimedia-rich Web site covering the breadth of South Coast since its inception almost 15 years ago.
The e-edition is a page-by-page electronic reproduction of the newspaper, complete with a seven-day archive, available at your fingertips wherever you and an online browser are. Our SouthCoastToday.com Web site conveniently delivers both the print stories and photos as well as a broad menu of unique online content, including targeted regional information in our Data Bank (municipal salaries, campaign contributions and restaurant inspections); videos of news events (such as a fire-damaged historic home coming down); our Sports Zone podcasts on local teams; audio slideshows; galleries of dozens of photos of community events; local history spotlights; story archives that go back to 1995; and more. Finally, our All-Access combination subscription offers all that and the print product delivered to your home for only a small incremental weekly fee over the print subscription cost.
PBN: Now that you are charging for SouthCoastToday.com, do you see this as raising the bar for how the quality of the site? Not to say that it’s poor quality now, but rather, do you have higher expectations for it now that it costs people money? Will subscribers?
HARRINGTON: The Standard-Times and SouthCoastToday.com already are acknowledged leaders in New England in quality content. The Standard-Times was named New England Newspaper of the Year for 2009 among papers its size by the New England Newspaper Association last spring. SouthCoastToday.com, in turn, just over a year ago was named the best overall Web site in its category in New England in 2008 by the New England Associated Press News Executives. Our staff writers and photographers continue to win individual awards for investigative work, breaking-news stories, columns and incredible photo-journalism. All that high-quality content and more cross paths on SouthCoastToday.com, minute to minute.
Our team of dedicated professional journalists by definition strives always to ever deepen the existing local content online, working on new analytical reports, adding new multimedia presentations, sending daily e-mail updates and breaking news alerts via e-mail and text message, and overall enhancing the user’s experience. We expect nothing less of ourselves, and know our subscribers always have and always will as well.
PBN: How much of this came from inside the Standard-Times, and how much did it come from Dow Jones Local Media Group or News Corp.? Do you expect your sister papers to try a similar model?
HARRINGTON: Since this question addresses the Dow Jones Local Media group as a whole going forward, it should go to Howard Hoffman, the company’s vice president of corporate affairs. He said: “Our news is valued by readers. Whether the Standard-Times in Massachusetts or The Wall Street Journal around the world, our unique content attracts paying customers because it is compelling and not available anywhere else in print or online. Dow Jones believes readers should and will pay for that value. The other newspapers of the Local Media Group are developing online plans appropriate to the business needs of their communities.” •
