Another installment in the paid content drama began to unfold today with the first release of a metered model deployed using Press+, the consumer face of Journalism Online. Though the first installation of Press+ is news in and of itself, there’s another aspect of the model that’s unique. Lancaster Online, the publication to roll out the system, chose to meter only a specific section of its content: the obituaries. Starting this morning, those who wish to view more than seven obituaries a month will have to pay. Or die trying.
I visited the site earlier today to get a better sense of exactly how the implementation works. After a horrific paywall experience last week, I wasn’t hopeful that the experience would be very friendly. But to my surprise the Press+ experience wasn’t all that bad. When I clicked on an obituary item, I was presented with a fairly clean modal window that helped me understand what was about to happen:
The dialog box offers me its sympathy. That was nice of it.
The dialog thanked me for visiting and even offered me its sympathy in case I had been looking for the obit of a loved one. It explained the model to me in relatively simple terms, and then asked me to either create a Press+ account or to continue reading my article. The modal window was an important part of the experience, allowing me to keep my goal of reading the content literally within site, behind an opaque overlay.
The after clicking the ‘Sign Up’ option, the modal presented me with a new screen that offered payment options.
Two payment options: $1.99 for the month, $19.99 for the year.
I didn’t really care to read the actual obituary, and even I had the prices seemed a little steep for me. But the experience itself was lightweight enough to allow me to consider the financial cost benefit without the added burden of frustration and confusion. It’s a lot different from my last experience. But it’s still a hard sell.
So why did Lancaster Online choose the obituaries section? The explanation, as reported here by paidContent.org and here in more depth by Poynter, makes fair sense. Says the paper’s editor, Ernie Schreiber, “…we chose to meter obituaries because they are unique content for us. Readers cannot easily access them elsewhere.” It’s probably a fair point, even at first the notion seems rather grotesque. While Schreiber admitted that the meter will not, by itself, fundamentally change the revenue picture at the publication, the move was executed strategically and only after a well thought-out process that considered audience, revenue, and price. I highly suggest reading the article from Poynter in full to get a better sense of how intensely (and publicly) Schreiber thought about the process. It’s an encouraging sign, a bright spot in what has often seemed to be an industry unwilling to embrace experimentation as a vital part of its survival. Let’s hope we continue to see similar thoughtfulness elsewhere.
The obituary experiment and the Press+ system don’t, I think, mark the end of our journey toward a fully modernized news ecosystem. On average, the American local newspaper isn’t as well prepared as Schreiber’s publication, and it’s not clear that the current obituary stranglehold he’s banked on will survive beyond the rest of the paper’s relatively commoditized content (and yes, I checked, obituaries.com is already up and running). There’s still a missing piece of the puzzle for the news industry on a large scale, and I’m still not convinced that newspapers can generate adequate revenue without a central distribution mechanism, even with systems like Press+ that can help reduce the friction of actual payment. Don’t get me wrong – getting the payment right is a key piece of the puzzle. But in a content market that’s being flooded ever faster each day, it’s not going be enough to hope the customers come to your front door every day – especially when your neighbor’s giving it away for free.
Tags: distribution, media, news, newspapers, paywall
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