What's new with the newspaper?

As a Media Buyer/Planner, I’ve been asked about Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s, JS Everywhere digital subscription plan that was announced earlier in January, and how it will affect readers and advertisers. I thought I would take a few minutes to blog about it.

Here’s the announcement. MJS certainly isn’t alone in incorporating a paywall model to their online website. The New York Times, Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News have already added similar digital subscription plans in recent years.

So what does the JSOnline digital subscription mean and how will it affect you?

If you subscribe to the paper either with the daily or Sunday subscription (coupons!) you will still get full access to the JSO website and don’t need to pay any additional dollars to read your news online. If you are a non-subscriber you will get access to 20 articles for free, per calendar month. Beyond the 20 articles you will need to purchase a digital subscription. Who has time to keep tabs?? Don’t worry; you’ll get a notice on the site if you’re getting close to your article limit. Don’t let this get you down though, because, the home page, section indexes, videos, sports statistics pages, classified ads and TapMilwaukee channel will remain free for all users.

This new pay model isn’t that radical but a change people will have to start getting used to as newspapers are pushed to find new revenue streams.

On the advertising side, we’re hearing it won’t affect traffic all that much. Prime advertising space, like the home page and the section index pages is still free to all readers. The online inventory we’ve heard that will be affected is what is called ‘remnant ad space’ (run of site ads, below the fold type of stuff).

It will be interesting to see how many more newspapers go the paywall model and how it evolves over time. I have no doubt more newspapers will be moving in this direction.

- Sarah Richmond