news on the news

R.I.P. unlimited free online news. Possibly for real this time (at least from newspapers). The nation’s largest newspaper chain is said to be planning a  roll out of its paid model by the end of this year.

Forbes is reporting Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper chain, which controls more than 80 newspapers around the country from small community papers to USA Today, apparently has plans to switch over its community papers to a tiered pay model this year. (One notable exception: USA Today.) The switch to a tiered paywall — where the first few stories per month are free — comes amid a renewed emphasis on digital-first news gathering, which has included handing out thousands of iPhones and iPads to news staffers at various properties.

From Forbes:

Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, is planning to switch over all of its 80 community newspapers to a paid model by the end of the year, it announced during an investor day held in Manhattan Wednesday.

“We will begin to restrict some access to non-subscribers,” said Bob Dickey, president of community publishing. The model is similar to the metered system adopted by The New York Times a year ago, in which online readers are able to view a limited number of pages for free each month. That quota will be between five and 15 articles, depending on the paper, said Dickey. Six Gannett papers already have a digital pay regimen in place.

This news is hardly unexpected. Not only are other major newspapers and outlets heading in this direction, but Gannett itself has been toying with this model at some of its properties for some time and started actively testing this tiered model this month.

Jim Romenesko posted the paywall FAQ customers of those test sites received in January. According to that, subscribers continue to have unfettered access to all content on all platforms.

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The hyperlocal Chicago News Cooperative site, which supplies Chicago-area content to the New York Times, announced today it will suspend publication. The non-profit site was founded in 2009. It will stop production to reassess the situation on Feb. 26.

In a letter posted on the site, editor James O’Shea says:

Unlike similar start-up efforts like the Texas Tribune in Austin, the Bay Citizen inSan Francisco and ProPublica in New York, we never recruited the kind of seven figure donations from people of means concerned about the declining quality of news coverage around the country. As a result, CNC never raised the resources to make investments in the business side of our operation that would have generated the revenue we needed to achieve our original goal – a self-sustaining news operation within 5 years.

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Yesterday, Facebook revealed the names of 12 media companies launching social reader apps on Timeline. Seven of them are news-themed.

The Guardian and the Washington Post were two of the biggest names to first experiment with social readers. So far, almost 6 million people have signed up for and installed The Guardian‘s news app, says Martin Belam, the news organization’s lead user experience and information architect. More than 5o percent of users are under the age of 24.

“The app is putting our reporting and features in front of the grown-up audience of the future,” Belam recently blogged.

Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s director of media partnerships, concurs that the apps have, so far, shown “significant increases in traffic and engagement.”

“These apps create new ways for readers to discover content, while giving publishers the opportunity to reach new audiences,” Osofsky wrote in a blog post announcing the newest additions to Timeline. “They’re built around news and content people care about and identify with and provide easy ways to control the social experience.”

So, who are the new news apps on the block?

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According to a report by Pew Research Center released on Monday, digital advertising is on track to overtake all other platforms by 2016. Though there has been little success in trying to get traditional advertisers to move online, the focus should not be on transferring the models of legacy media advertising to the digital world, but rather using new media to develop better models. This is already happening with advertising exchanges that offer an alternative to advertising networks, the largest of which are owned by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Of course, the tech savvy companies are at an advantage here—developing new models is easier than switching from the old to new. Nonetheless, how can digital advertising better serve the news?
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The Associated Press says it’s filed a lawsuit today against news aggregator Meltwater News in U.S. District Court. The suit claims that Norway-based Meltwater — a paid electronic clipping service that monitors and delivers news stories on keyword-specific topics to its paying customers — spreads original AP content verbatim without paying licensing fees. Those fees help support the AP’s news gathering, but also add costs that Meltwater doesn’t incur, which allows it to offer its service cheaper than the AP, thereby undercutting and competing directly against the news service.

AP President and CEO Tom Curley described the organization as a “parasitic distribution service” in a statement. He says the service “competes directly with traditional news sources without paying license fees to cover the costs of creating those stories. It has a significant negative impact on the ability of AP to continue providing the high-quality news reports on which the public relies.”
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