Newport Daily News

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 1:24pm on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Since the Newport Daily News started charging a hefty sum for access to its website, readers have been returning to the print edition, Newsweek magazine reported on September 1, 2009:

"Spooky things began to happen this summer in the yachting mecca of Newport, R.I., shortly after the Newport Daily News hurled caution to the wind and began charging a $345 subscription fee for its online news—$200 more than for the print edition.

First, the phones stopped ringing in the paper's circulation department. Fewer subscribers were canceling home delivery of the paper, something they had been doing in droves when they knew they could get the same product for free at NewportDailyNews.com. "Those calls have stopped," William F. Lucey III, assistant publisher and general manager, told NEWSWEEK.

But something even stranger happened: after the Web site put up a pay wall for nearly all its content, readers would brave driving rainstorms to go out and buy the newspaper. Since then, newsstand sales of the Newport Daily News have jumped by 200 copies a day. For a paper with a daily circulation of 13,000, that's a significant gain, especially since, in an era in which most papers are seeing steep declines in readership, even holding steady is a success; an increase is a triumph. "The fact that weather hasn't been fantastic makes me believe that the pay wall has had an effect," Lucey says. "We think that more people are buying the paper now that they can't get it for free online."

The full story:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/214607

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 3:56pm on Thursday, June 25th, 2009

The Newport Daily News is punishing people who only want to read the news online, according to Ken Magill, writing in Chief Marketer on June 24, 2009:

"And from the print-publisher-in-utter-denial file comes news that the Newport, RI Daily News is changing its pricing structure to punish people who want to read their news only online.

The Daily News will now charge $145 annually to a newspaper subscriber, $245 if a subscriber wants the paper and access to the paper’s Web site—and, if you can believe it, $345 if the subscriber only wants the Web site.

Yep, The Daily News is charging subscribers more than twice for its content online than for its printed edition.

Bold? Yes. Stupid? Double plus yes."

The full story:
http://chiefmarketer.com/0624-newspaper-death-Newport-Daily-News/