by Search Copywriter
D. Warburton
D. Warburton
The Johnston Press has become the first regional publisher in the UK to begin charging users for online news content.The publisher, which owns more than 300 papers across Britain, is trialing payment services for six of its local titles. These include the Northumberland Gazette, the Ripley & Heanor News, the Whitby Gazette and the Worksop Guardian in England, as well as the Carrick Gazette and Southern Reporter in Scotland.
The BBC reports that the publisher is making the move as an experiment to assess the impact of charging for content. It will offer readers a three-month subscription for £5 allowing users to access all online content, or direct unsubscribed browsers to buy the newspapers instead.
This "experiment" comes in the wake of the media attention generated by Rupert Murdoch's decision to remove News Corporation content from Google, after accusing the search engine of "stealing" news stories from publishers without their consent. More publishers are turning to paid content models as a means of fighting the advertising recession, and Johnston has previously introduced charges for premium content for its leading title The Scotsman.
Emily Bell, the Guardian's director of digital content, explained: "Once you start restricting access on the websites, if you have content that can broadly be found somewhere else, then you really restrict the number of people coming to websites.
"I think it's great that people are experimenting with lots of different models because undoubtedly we need to find more money in the market."
