Paying for your (online) paper: Postmedia puts up paywalls

Remember the good ol' days when you had to pay for a newspaper subscription? Well, they're back. This time, those subscriptions are digital.

Say hello to paywalls, Canada.

As of today, four high-profile Postmedia newspapers are limiting readers' access to free newspaper content online. The Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Province, Vancouver Sun and National Post will each have caps on how many articles a reader can access before being asked to pay.

Readers will be able to access breaking-news stories and up to 15 non-breaking news articles a month. Beyond that, they'll be asked to subscribe.

Current subscription rates range between $7.95 and $9.95 a month. The National Post will only ask for money from international readers.

(Print subscribers will have full access to the digital papers.)

These online newspapers aren't alone. The Globe and Mail reports that newspapers across North America are "scrambling to monetize their digital content to make up for declining print advertising revenue."

The Globe and Mail will also implement a metered paywall system this fall.

The owners of Brunswick News introduced paywalls earlier this year, offering a discount to online subscribers who are willing to receive a print version at home as well.

The Toronto Star, Canada's largest paper, still grants free access to readers — but is already experimenting with paywalls at the Hamilton Spectator.

Rogers Media plans to implement paywalls its online versions of Chatelaine and Maclean's by the end of the year.

These papers insist that the paywalls are needed to ensure a continued investment in quality in-depth journalism:

"You can't spend millions of dollars on content and just give it away," Postmedia Network Inc. chief executive officer Paul Godfrey said last week.

The New York Times' paywall model has been considered a huge success, and now has almost 500,000 paying digital subscribers. The company is expected to bring in $85-million this year from those subscriptions.

The Wall Street Journal was the first newspaper to implement a paywall. Since that move in 1997, the number of digital subscribers has grown to 537,000.

The Canadian papers hope the paywall will boost revenue for them, too — without losing significant readership.

Should we have to pay for online content? Only if quality can be guaranteed, some critics say.

"[T]he battle for eyes on pages or screens needs to be fought over content," says Techcentral's deputy editor, Craig Wilson. "The publications with the best writers, editors and photographers deserve to be read, and they deserve to get paid. By paying for content, you get the benefit of reassurances. The publication, meanwhile, gets reminded that if it doesn't keep up to stand, it'll lose your attention and with it your monthly payment."

Others argue that paywalls restrict the flow of content and will make it difficult for smaller papers generating less original content than the Times or Wall Street Journal to survive.

"The challenge for all papers is that free content is still plentiful online. And many papers don't provide much motivation for new sign-ups. Most publishers are giving full online access to existing print subscribers, so the pool of potential new digital subscribers is relatively small. Also, many publishers are using the so-called metered strategy, under which nonsubscribers can read a certain number of articles free. Typically, only around 10% to 20% of their online readers visit the site enough to run into the pay requirement, depending on where the threshold is set," the Wall Street Journal reports.

Would you pay for your online content? And, assuming you're not made of money, if all online papers go this route, how would you choose which news source(s) to subscribe to?

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