Globe and Mail announces a paywall coming later this year

by Charlie Smith on May 10th, 2012 at 2:10 PM

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The publisher of the Globe and Mail, Phillip Crawley, has announced to staff that their newspaper will follow in the footsteps of others, including the New York Times and Postmedia Network Inc., by charging readers for online content.

The paper reported that it will "implement a metered paywall system this fall, asking readers to pay if they read more than a certain number of articles each month".

There is no information at this point about how much it will cost to read online Globe and Mail articles, nor how many freebies will be allowed per month.

"Based on what we see going on in the advertising market, we’ve decided to go for it now," Crawley is quoted as saying. "We had already made the decision, it was a case of how quickly we would do it.”

The Globe and Mail will also put some staff on furloughs this summer to reduce costs.

Postmedia recently announced that it will create paywalls at the Vancouver Sun, Province, and Ottawa Citizen newspapers.

Comments

4 Comments

DavidH

May 10, 2012 at 4:39pm

I also noticed today, through RSS feeds, that a number of smaller community papers in BC are going the same route. If they're part of a conglomerate like Black Press, the trend will definitely continue.

Music stores? Gone. Video stores? Gone. News organizations ... still trying desperately to cling to an obviously hopeless subscription model.

Sadly, I don't think that "citizen reporting" and "blogs" can fill the void. But in the absence of more creative solutions from media companies, that's what we will be left with.

Oh well. It will be good to kick the morning news habit. What I don't know won't hurt me. ;)

Shawn

May 11, 2012 at 6:15am

The bigggest problem The Globe faces is how little they publish is worth reading. The NY Times can get away with charging because they publish a lot that people want to read.