A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

keeps them coming back to the site so frequently before blocking them with a pay wall,
Yelvington says. Once understood, it might be possible to persuade them “to pitch in
some cash” one way or another, he says. 68
At the Financial Times, the percentage of occasional users who decide to subscribe
when they encounter the pay wall is very small—”single digits,” Freeland told me a in
brief interview—”but that’s OK.”
The metered approach is useful for several reasons. It generates some advertising
revenue from those occasional visitors and it provides a taste of the publication that
might one day prompt subscriptions in print or online. In the case of visitors who do
subscribe when the meter runs out, Freeland points out: “Generating subscriptions like
that is very cheap.”
Freeland argues that “pay walls clearly do work for niche publications—and your
niche can be sports, maybe technology, it might even be entertainment.” She adds: “The
bigger question is, ‘Can you charge for general news?’” Freeland says she hopes her
local paper—The New York Times—will figure out a way to do so and proposes one
example of not‐exactly‐general news that she’d be willing to pay for: “I would pay to
know about schools. There’s nothing that parents are more obsessive about.”
Jim O’Shea plans to put Freeland’s theory to the test with the first of many “news
interest networks” he hopes to introduce at the Chicago News Cooperative. He and his
colleagues met Jan. 19, 2010 with a group of about 34 people with special interest in
education and asked them what should go into the co‐op’s education network: “What’s
something they’d place high value on, and how might it play out journalistically?”
O’Shea plans similar meetings with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, an
organization with about 7,000 members especially interested in international issues.
Since the Chicago Tribune has closed all of its foreign bureaus, O’Shea says he’s anxious
to see how the Chicago News Cooperative might collaborate with the Council to meet
the needs of its members—and grow membership in both organizations.
Among the advantages of paid content, in Freeland’s mind, is “becoming less
advertiser‐dependent.”
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