The Washington Post will soon begin charging readers for access to its Web site, adopting a model that has taken hold at hundreds of newspapers as they attempt to make money from their online traffic.
The Post announced the change on Monday, saying it would take effect in the summer. It did not announce any details about pricing, but said readers would be allowed to read 20 articles or multimedia features free each month.
“News consumers are savvy; they understand the high cost of a top quality newsgathering operation and the importance of maintaining the kind of in-depth reporting for which The Post is known,” Katharine Weymouth, the paper’s publisher, said in a statement. “Our digital package is a valuable one and we are going to ask our readers to pay for it and help support our newsgathering as they have done for many years with the print edition.”
Like the so-called paywall plans at many other papers, The Post’s includes various exceptions for readers to continue to gain access to articles free of charge. Students, teachers, school administrators, government employees and military personnel — a large part of The Post’s traditional audience in and around Washington — will continue to have unlimited access to the site. Articles viewed via links from Google, Facebook and elsewhere on the Internet will also not count against a reader’s monthly total.
The Post is the latest and one of the largest American papers to institute an online paywall. The model has been used by The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times for years, and The New York Times introduced a version of it in 2011. The Pew Research Center, in its annual State of the News Media report, released Monday, said that about 450 papers in the United States have moved to paywalls, more than double the number from the year before.
Debate inside The Washington Post Company may have accounted for its late adoption of the model. Warren E. Buffett, the company’s largest shareholder outside of the Graham family, has been a vocal proponent of paywalls, while Donald E. Graham, its chief executive and chairman, has been less sanguine, saying that the change might drive away its online readers around the country.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/washington-post-says-pay-model-will-start-this-summer/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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