Newspapers
Globe: We may wall off our web site
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Aug 10, 2009 - 8:14:34 AM

The Boston Globe may get walled off before it gets sold off.

The newspaper’s owner, the New York Times Co., said late last week that it will likely adopt a pay model for Boston.com in the future.

The newspaper informed its unions of this intent last Thursday and publicly acknowledged the move on Friday.

“Nothing is absolute, but we are heading toward some sort of consumer pay model,” a Globe spokesperson told the Associated Press.

No timetable has been set for the move, nor has the paper decided yet on what sort of model will be employed.

It is exploring several options, including allowing a certain number of pages to be viewed for free before fees set in or charging for access to certain sections, such as sports, arts and entertainment.

The possible move comes as more and more newspapers are exploring a switch to paid content.

The New York Times conducted a survey of readers to see how receptive they’d be to a paid content model and is expected to institute one within the coming year, two years after abandoning a program that walled off certain web site content behind a paid wall.

News Corp., whose WSJ.com is already paid, will make all of its online news content premium within the next year, CEO Rupert Murdoch recently said.

Late last week, word came that the Financial Times is considering an iTunes-like model, in which readers would have to pay on a per-article basis, instead of buying a full subscription to FT.com, which along with WSJ.com is one of the industry’s only examples of a successful paid-paper site.

The NYT Co. confirmed last week that the Globe has been put on the block for possible sale.

The company renegotiated the paper’s union contracts earlier this year after threatening to shut down the money-losing paper.

Several serious bidders have emerged, including a group led by ex-ad man Jack Connors and another by Boston Celtics owner Stephen Pagliuca.



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