Search »

‘The Times’ to Flip to Paid Content Model, with Subs and 24-Hour Access; No Micropayments

Editor of News International’s The Times, James Harding, talked about the newspaper’s plans to implement a paid online model come next spring, during a speech at the Society of Editors conference in Stansted, Essex.

The newspaper will charge a fee for 24-hour access to the paper’s website; readers will also be able to purchase subscriptions. What will not be offered are micropayment options for purchasing individual articles. Allowing readers to purchase individual articles is a slippery slope for newspapers, he hinted (via The Guardian), saying the practice leads papers to write “a lot more about Britney Spears and a lot less about Tamils in northern Sri Lanka.”

Harding did not indicate how much per-day or subscription access would cost.

Harding pointed out that The Times no longer distributes free copies of the newspaper in bulk to airlines and hotels. Newspaper companies have long argued that giving away bulk copies of papers was a valuable sampling exercise, but it is an expensive one, and bulk sales have apparently had little affect on overall sales. News International is a subsidiary of News Corp, which has vowed to stop giving away content.

Such a practice devalues a paper’s best customers, Harding says. “We give the paper away to people who could not care less and we pay little or no attention to people who love it and read it every day,” he is quoted as saying.

News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch originally said that all the company’s news sites will be charging for content by next spring, but earlier this month he said that deadline may not be met. Still, his company is at the forefront of the debate on how to flip newspapers to a paid content model.

News Corp has also said it will stop allowing Google to index its content. While the move will decrease by a large margin the amount of traffic that goes to News Corp.‘s news sites, Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, says the company will survive both economically and audience-wise without Google driving traffic to its sites.