Paywalls with windows a sensible way to persuade the readers

The ‘New York Times’, the ‘Boston Globe’ and the Gannett group have all followed in the footsteps of paywall pioneer the ‘Wall Street Journal’

IF THE newspaper business has been hesitating, lost and confused, at a crossroads with scratched-out signs for what seems like forever already, two events happened this week that should have pushed it further down the bumpy path named “Paywall Avenue – revenues this way”.

The first is that the Los Angeles Timesbegan its "membership program", effectively a paywall it is declining to call a paywall. The second is that Apple has unveiled another of those iPad thingies.

It’s probably called the iPad HD, or possibly the iPad 3 – “at the time of writing” are five words that should really die a death in a fully converted digital media age, but we’re not there yet, and so “probably” and “possibly” is the most certainty that copy deadlines allow. In any case, Apple could have launched the iPad Fuzzy Felt in San Francisco yesterday and it would still have the newspaper industry salivating at the prospect of how it might help them monetise their product again.

Indeed, possibly the most interesting advance rumour from an “old media” perspective was not any of the touchy-feely features of the new model, but the suggestion that Apple will keep the iPad 2 in circulation at more modest price points – a strategy that will likely have a democratising effect on the iPad customer base while retaining all the toy-like desirability of its premium brand.

Despite great swathes of editorial redundancies in recent years, the LA Timesis still a premium brand in American journalism, capable of collecting the odd Pulitzer even as its owner, Tribune Co, has languished in bankruptcy. Its decision to begin charging readers for online access is less interesting in isolation than it is when viewed as part of the greater trend. What AOL's TechCrunch site calls "the paywall bandwagon" could more favourably be termed "paywall momentum".

For as the LA Timeswas keen to point out itself, the list of US news outlets that charge for online content is lengthening. The New York Times,the Boston Globeand the Gannett group have all followed in the footsteps of paywall pioneer the Wall Street Journal.

The LA Times"membership program" has a one-month trial rate of 99 cents, rising to $1.99 a week, with the Sunday paper thrown in. If you don't take delivery of the printed ad-laden Sunday paper, the subscription actually costs more ($3.99 a week), while subscribers to that relic of the pre-iPad age – the printed paper – will not be charged for digital access. Readers who access online content through a tablet or smartphone app also won't have to pay, although there are plans to charge for app-access in future.

Crucially, readers who don't subscribe will be able to read 15 stories a month for free, making this a "soft" or "porous" paywall not too dissimilar to that at the New York Times, and markedly different from the "hard" paywall of the Timesand indeed the "no paywall ever . . . (or at least not as long as I'm in charge)" philosophy of Alan Rusbridger's Guardian, where the "paid tour" of the iPad app sits alongside its free site pass.

These are experiments, but that doesn't make them clueless. The approach of the LA Timesto its not-a-paywall paywall perfectly reflects the newspaper industry's current dual need to straddle both the physical and digital worlds. It doesn't want to decimate revenues from its most profitable print edition (Sunday) prematurely, nor does it want to erode online traffic by erecting a windowless wall.

Choosing a porous model is a sensible way, for now, of protecting the advertising value of "passing through" site visitors, who may even be persuaded to buy the journalism they see in the shop window. It doesn't mean a doubt-ridden LA Timesis secretly a slave to the dogma that people "just won't pay" for online journalism. Even if that is true now, it isn't automatically destined to be true forever.

Rupert Murdoch, who in the 1990s created a market for television sport and movie subscriptions out of nothing more or less than content that people wanted to see, has been more gung-ho than most about the paywall road. As a result, he's further down that road. The Timesand Sunday Timeslast week increased the price of their digital pack, which includes tablet and mobile editions, from £2 to £4 a week for new subscribers. Those who subscribed before March 1st enjoy a price freeze, suggesting the rise is more about confidence in the product's market value than it is about desperately making up a revenue shortfall from those who have already paid.

Meanwhile, expect the usual iPad hype to raise your anti-consumerist hackles even as the prospect of owning one causes your pupils to dilate. You won’t be alone. Analysts at ISI Group forecast that Apple will shift 60 million iPads in 2012, 50 per cent more than last year. Other tablets are available.

Somewhere within that number, newspaper executives believe, lurk enough subscribers for a viable app-customer base – enough to close off their free web presences and invite readers to join them in the land of the paid subscription. Get the timing, pricing or content wrong, however, and those web readers may just go back the way they came.