World Association of News Publishers


Globe and Mail leading the charge in Canada

Globe and Mail leading the charge in Canada

Article ID:

16448

John Stackhouse, Editor-in-Chief, The Globe and Mail

Canadian daily The Globe and Mail introduced a metered paid online model in October 2012. Readers can now read 10 articles free before being asked to subscribe at C$19.99.

It is a similar model to the one adopted by The New York Times, the Financial Times and hundreds of local and regional papers across the US: the metered approach allows content to remain part of the global web conversation, while only asking frequent readers to pay. The Toronto Star, one of The Globe and Mail’s leading competitor papers, is due to launch paid online content this year.

In The Globe and Mail paywall’s first 100 days, 80,000 people signed up to be digital subscribers, publisher Philip Crawley said in March.

We spoke to The Globe and Mail’s Editor-in-Chief John Stackhouse about the impact that paid online content has had on the newsroom and any advice he had for editors whose papers were planning to do the same. He will be speaking on this topic at the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Bangkok, 2-5 June.

WAN-IFRA: How has the metered payment model changed the way that editors and journalists work?

John Stackhouse: It has been pretty fabulous. Because of the new subscriber data we are getting, we have a pretty strong and accurate sense of what our subscribers want – and while it’s important not to lurch or swing too much in one direction because of a certain appetite of the day – it has given us a lot more confidence in focusing on our core areas.

It has provided a great reaffirmation of what we already suspected: our subscribers have been devouring business, political and world content. This is encouraging to us because we are one of the few papers in North America who is committed to international coverage.

Has this knowledge changed your coverage?

We have started to up coverage in some areas: we have moved a couple of people to Ottawa to add to our political coverage, we have invested a bit more in business content, we are in the process of hiring someone fairly senior in Calgary from a competitor to add to our energy coverage because we’ve seen a subscription appetite there.

We are cutting back in other areas: clearly the economic forces that seem to be prevailing in global media are not leaving us alone, and we have to manage our overall costs more aggressively. But within that overall cost, we are shifting towards those core areas where we think we also have a competitive advantage.

It has been helpful for assigning editors to see time-of-day consumption and start to shift resources around a bit. We have known for a long time that our core readers are very active first thing in the morning (around 7-10am), for obvious reasons, so we had already shifted parts of the newsroom to that part of the day. Now some sections are seeing that there’s a reasonable appetite in the evening for content. So we are modifying both our creation of content, and our editing and publishing of it, to be a bit more mindful of that end-of-day appetite.

Have you done a redesign or rebranding to make the paid online offering more appealing?

The site design remains the same. We simply didn’t have the time or the development resources to redesign the site because all of our development resources were going into the subscription infrastructure.

In terms of branding, we have created some subscriber-only content. In the business section we have two vehicles in particular: one is called ROB Insight (Report On Business) and one is called Streetwise. We have a specific team for each group that works right out of our business section, and we publish that material largely in the morning and only for subscribers. We also publish a fair bit of it in print, largely as a promotional technique, to say to readers, ‘look what you could have got yesterday morning if you were on our site.’

Learning from that, which we launched in the fall, this winter we launched a more ambitious subscriber-only political channel. We now publish two or three articles a day, heavily programmed – morning, afternoon, evening – from both Ottawa and provincial capitals, on the politics of the day. And we’ve put our premier political columnist, John Ibbitson, fully behind a paywall.

John writes in the newspaper once a week, but he has been an online-focused columnist for a number of years, and we opted to make him subscriber-only for a couple of reasons:

  • To reward subscribers and to deepen their commitment. One of the challenges for newspapers erecting paywalls, in many cases, is an initial enthusiasm among your loyalists, your fan club who wants to support you, and they take up a subscription or migrate their subscription to an online model. That’s all good, but then after a couple of months there is always a temptation to quit. We wanted to add content for subscribers to ensure that they are much less inclined to cancel: to heighten the addiction if you will. Making John’s content subscriber-only was very much meant for that.
  • To drive what we call ‘paywall encounters.’ We want people to hit a subscription message, and you’ll do that after eating up your 10 pieces on the metre, but we also want to do it through subscriber-only content. So if a reader sees a compelling John Ibbitson column on the homepage, they might click on it even if it says subscriber-only and get a message.

We’ve found that with both business and politics articles, the subscriber-conversion rate is higher: if people hit that subscribe message on a business or politics article, they are more inclined to subscribe. That means we need more of that content behind the wall.

On the whole have journalists been positive about this change?

 Yes. Journalists in my experience want their journalism to be paid for. Frankly I think they’re a little tired of the doom and gloom around the industry, and they’re excited to see us doing something that is fairly ambitious and something that is a big bet on journalism: we are saying we think people will pay for what journalists produce, and we set out to prove that.

Do you think that paid online content is changing traditional print attitudes towards the web?

I think so.

There has been a concern among some journalists over the last number of years that we are on a race to the bottom in terms of online traffic, and that news sites will do anything to grab traffic, and as a result our journalistic values and practices have been compromised. You will hear many journalists saying ‘you’ll do anything to get traffic,’ and citing cat-on-skateboard videos as an example. That concern is fair – you can look at any number of news sites around the world and you’ll see incidences of that.

There’s also a concern that the web has forced journalists to be a bit more fast and loose and as a result the quality of journalism is not as good. Some people would argue that the rigour of reporting and the rigour of editing have gone down.

So the emergence of pay models has given the critics of journalism an opportunity to pause and reassess what we’re doing for a digital audience.

Do you have any advice for other papers considering a paid online model?

Do as much reader research as you can and share it with the journalists. Journalists are generally smart people and they are market-savvy. They also have the most intimate relationships with our readers. They are not hostile to market economics, but they are often excluded from data sharing within the organisation, or reader data is presented in such a way that it’s arcane for them.

Get in front of the newsroom and say these are our readers, and these are the readers we want, and this is what they want from us. Journalists will respond to that in most cases.

Make sure that you’ve got some sort of set up for that information to be fairly consistent in terms of its flow. You don’t want to throw a bunch of information at the newsroom and then disappear for a year. We’ve set up a couple of people in the newsroom to be data specialists, and they work with our analytics department and their job is to help the newsroom understand what our readers, both free and subscribers, want to read.

Be honest about what isn’t needed and be prepared to cut that. One of the curses of newspapers is that we mostly still have the legacy of trying to be everything to everyone – that’s no longer needed because everyone has access to everything. We have to be more honest with ourselves and our staff, to say what isn’t as important to our readers and then to reduce or cut that entirely in order to better finance the core areas.


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Emma Goodman

Date

2013-04-24 09:35

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