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Newsday: We're
putting up a pay wall

Cablevision-owned paper will charge $5 per week

By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Oct 23, 2009

Another newspaper is disappearing behind the wall.

Newsday, the Long Island daily that was sold to Cablevision last year, will charge non-subscribers $5 per week for access to its web site starting Wednesday.

Newspaper subscribers and subscribers to Cablevision's Optimum Online service will continue to access the web site for free. Certain features, including weather, school closing and obituaries, will also be free, as will access to the paper's homepage.

But the majority of content will be walled off for the equivalent to the price of home delivery.

The move is not unexpected. Indeed, many newspapers are toying with the idea of walling off their content in the wake of huge advertising declines and decreasing circulation.

They have to make up the lost revenue somewhere, publishers reason, so why give away the content that people are paying for in print?

Earlier this week, the Boston Herald said it will likely start charging for content next year, and rival the Boston Globe has hinted that it may do the same.

The New York Times is considering several paid models after a brief experiment two years ago with premium content.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently began charging for a package of web extras, and Media News has said its papers will likely wall off their sites as well.

Of course two large papers, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, have been charging their web readers for years, but those two are seen as exceptions to the longtime rule, as they cater to business readers who can write off the expense.

News Corp., which owns the Journal and actually bid for Newsday last year, has said that it will begin charging for all of its news sites in the near future.

Newsday expects to lose some unique visitors with the new system, though it notes that three quarters of Long Island residents will still be able to access the site for free due to their newspaper or Optimum subscriptions.

Louisa Ada Seltzer is a staff writer for Media Life.	© 2009 Media Life Magazine

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