[Closed] Guardian online going behind a paywall?

Oh no, not another tax on public sector workers!!! This could be the final straw!

Dammit

I get a weird pleasure reading the comments on Bike Blog articles. The level of arrogance and ignorance within can be quite something.

Although I'm surprised other papers haven't followed the move made by The Times sooner

the-muffin-man - Member

Oh no, not another tax on public sector workers!!! This could be the final straw!

Bugger. Their android app is excellent.

I am suprised. linky?

That'd be disappointing.

Source?

Otherwise, bullshit.

Bugger. Their android app is excellent.

Yeah they had a app for the iPhone that was free and very good, but they released a second app (not an update) and then nagged users of the first app to move to that.

Naturally the second app was subs-based.

I stuck with the first app (naturally) but it stopped working recently so I suspect the same thing will happen on Android.

The subscription people called this morning (I already subscribe) and that's what the guy said.

are they going to rename 'CommentIsFree' ?

Dave

[i]going behind a paywall[/i]

that's going on my w@nky phrase list.

Why shouldn't they charge? You have to buy the content in the paper, why should they give it free online?

We need a free (as in freedom, as in free from commercial pressure) media, unfortunately that was never going to be completely paid for by advertising, nor should we want it to be.

Clearly the Times has shown it can work, if the Guardian follows suit then I expect the Independent and the Telegraph to not be far behind. I guess the tabloids will remain free for ever through.

I'm not suprised. I've stopped buying newspapers as they're freely available online and a lot of the weekend supplement features I've already read online earlier in the week.

However, I'm now having to get the woodburner going with the artwork and cereal packet sculptures that my youngest kid brings home from school.

Glasgow Herald has just gone for a limited paywall too. I can see why they think they need to do this but I reckon we're just witnessing the death throes of the traditional printed press.

im pretty sure the guardian has been running at a loss for a while now, i expect the torygraph will follow, the tabloids/ hate mail will keep going on a mixture of salacious celebrity skullbuggery and the usual bigoted reactionary nonesense

the trouble with a paywall is that it ties you into one paper, i stopped bothering with the times after the paywall (which the guardian has been slagging of since its inception)

good news for the bbc though

BBC site has so little news on it though - very superficial. Mind you, the Guardian has been getting leaner as well the last couple of years.

im pretty sure the guardian has been running at a loss for a while now

You can say that again!

The Guardian has been losing money every year since 2004. Last year alone, it and its sister newspaper, the Observer, lost more than €47 million. It's only thanks to the farsightedness and generosity of its former owners, the Scott family, that the paper hasn't gone bankrupt.

Since 1936, the paper has been funded by the Scott Trust. This structure has but a single aim: "To secure the editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity."

However, the Guardian's losses have become too big to absorb -- and in 2007 the Scott Trust was forced to sell some of its assets to refill its coffers.......

.......the Guardian Media Group, recently warned that if the Guardian continued to make such heavy losses, the company would simply run out of money within five years.

[url= http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,789108,00.html ]Der Speigel Article About The Guardian[/url]

I think I'll go out and buy the paper instead...

🙁 I'll miss it. But not enough to pay for it.

Nowt on google news bar a piece about reducing the print edition.

footflaps - Member

BBC site has so little news on it though - very superficial. Mind you, the Guardian has been getting leaner as well the last couple of years.

i agree the top 10 most viewed stories are pretty woeful often 'celeb' driven bollox (strictly!!)
with the cuts the quality of stories has dropped especially in international news

Guardian readers can always read the Daily Mail instead.

"company charges price for providing goods and services" shocker

Aljazeera is still free and often offers a slightly more worldly view than the BBC (in my view). Good app for the iPhone too.

Pleae God can we stop calling it a paywall. There are plenty of other suitable words and phrases about to indicate charging for a service, we don't have to invent a new one. Grrr 👿

Paywall makes sense to me, new words are created every day, that's life. 🙂

Plus I don't think your lone voice of opposition will have much effect, sorry!

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=paywall&meta=

'subscription'

"Guardian online to charge a subscription?" makes perfect sense too, and doesn't involve any cringeworthy pseudo-technobabble marketing to$$

[i]Plus I don't think your lone voice of opposition will have much effect, sorry![/i]

Hey, Gandhi was a lone voice in the wilderness once 🙂

I suspect the OP has the wrong end of the stick... Alan Rushbridger (for it is he) has very firmly nailed his colours to the mast that the Gruinard will not charge for online content while he is editor. If the paper is about to start doing that then he will almost certainly be for the high jump and News International will be doing all it can to settle scores with him for his role in the NoTW story.

That said, the paper could certainly do with more revenue - it has revenues to support approx 250 editorial staff and has closer to 700 on the books (across Guardian and Observer).

I work for the Guardian and it’s the first I’ve heard. I suspect the OP's been slightly confused by the scheduled expiry of the ipad app free trial period. The app was launched in October with an initial 3 months free trial, ending in January when it will be charged at £9.99 a month.

I’ve been in several of the guardians “digital first” strategy briefings and it’s been made pretty clear that they don’t believe a paywall on the website will work. Its major revenue source is still the printed copy, which is predicted to remain the most profitable form of media for at least the next 5 years before digital revenue catches up.

However, as already pointed out, were loosing large sums of money every year, and whilst we’re a not-for-profit organisation, we do have to be sustainable. The Guardian is making some very big cuts right across the group, including half the staff at our plant alone. The printed product will be quite different from January/February going forward, with the website taking more of a leading role. The paper will try and engage and capture the readership in the morning with more in depth stories about recent events, whilst the faster digital side, such as the website will deliver more breaking news which is what its good at, and where the paper cant compete.

The guardian is also investing heavily in America. We are already established there as one of the top sources for international news and receive massive unique user hits on the .co.uk website from that region. Unfortunately the American sales market won’t take us seriously until we have a .com web address. This has led to the recent acquisition of www.guardiannews.com and a permanently based team there to try and tap the market. Hopefully some of these strategies will bring in the advertising revenue that is needed for the survival of the guardian and the Scott trust values of journalism.

I think the numbers for the Times have been very disappointing, and they've been reluctant to post the figures as they're being watched by most media outlets with intrigue.

Of course the low take up is most likely due to other news sources still being free, and potentially because the online price is not much less than the 'paper' price, so perhaps they need to work on this.

In the longer run we will have to pay for all of these kind of services, but in the short term there are enough free (advertising funded) alternatives.

were loosing large sums of money every year

Yep, definitely works for Teh Gruaniad 😀

glad to hear its still free!!

the guardian liveblogs are excellent btw!

Plus I don't think your lone voice of opposition will have much effect, sorry!

Thus spake the marketing man. Deserving of this

were loosing large sums of money every year,

I can see why they hired you, they love that cavalier approach to spelling.

😉

Grrr, beaten to it

😆 Bloody spelling Nazis. You’ll be disappointed to hear that I’m an engineer and not a tweed jacket wearing journo. Whilst its arguably just as important, I concern myself more with science and math, than I do English. 😛

Good input there from Grimy - but let's not let actual facts get in the way of righteous indignation.

I was surprised to read the first post though, as it really didn't seem in keeping with the Graun's digital strategy. If anything, it seems the print edition is being cut further and further back while the website continues to grow. If only certain online-only 'contributors' could be encouraged to stop, that would be even more cost effective. Roy Greenslade, for example; the blogs from random parts of the UK (London, Leeds etc), Lost in Showbiz.

Are you trying to say you're more 'support' than 'business core'?

I like Lost in Showbiz 😳

Bstards, to appease tge shareholders no doubt. All shareholders should be shot. Clarkson included.

Roy Greenslade is crap, it must be said. You'd have thought that as the digital guru he styles himself as he would have noticed people rarely comment on his pieces and that most that do seem to hate him. I would take that as a cue to stop...

Pleae God can we stop calling it a paywall. There are plenty of other suitable words and phrases about to indicate charging for a service, we don't have to invent a new one. Grrr

We could have
Monetary Partition
Fiscal Fence
Toll Door

for a start.

I suspect the OP has the wrong end of the stick... Alan Rushbridger (for it is he) has very firmly nailed his colours to the mast that the Gruinard will not charge for online content while he is editor. If the paper is about to start doing that then he will almost certainly be for the high jump and News International will be doing all it can to settle scores with him for his role in the NoTW story.

When were Rusbridger's colours nailed to the mast? Certainly not last year:

[i]For his part, Rusbridger said he would be "crazy to be fundamentalist" about rejecting paid-for access out of hand. So he welcomed Rupert Murdoch's decision to experiment and, though sceptical about it being successful, would not be averse to following suit if it was.[/i]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/may/19/paywalls-johnwitherow

Wasn't presenting this as a fact btw, just something interesting to come out of a conversation!

Grimy - thanks for the input.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/guardian-editor-paywalls

I maintain unequivocally that if the Guardian (or as Kelvin Mackenzie has it, The World's Worst) abandons free access online or moves towards any kind of online paywall that Rushbridger will be gone.

So it's not a paywall, it's a tax on Apple users.

Smart move if you ask me.
😉

Pleae God can we stop calling it a paywall. There are plenty of other suitable words and phrases about to indicate charging for a service, we don't have to invent a new one. Grrr

I don't see why it shouldn't be paid for?
Newspapers are businesses, aren't they?

Will they be keeping all that public sector job advertising behind the paywall, too?

If so, that could have a very big impact. Surely that's about the only revenue that's been keeping the Graun [s]not waving, just drowning[/s] just about afloat for years. Will it still be seen by sufficient numbers of people* to make it worthwhile as an advertising medium?

* People willing to pay for it, that is.

Will they be keeping all that public sector job advertising behind the paywall, too?

Read back, apparently it's not a paywall but a charge for the iPad app.

Will only cover a very small section of their users and I presume they can still use an iPad to look at The Guardian in a standard web browser.

Ah, OK, I see. My fault for not reading the whole thread first!

I'd imagine it will all go behind a paywall at some point though. Hard to see how else a newspaper can make money these days.

[url= http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/dec/25/ipad-kindle-newspapers-digital-print ]The Guardian softening the punters up for the paywall perhaps?[/url]