Editor and Publisher

Monday, April 23, 2001

MEDIA GENERAL TO CHARGE FOR NEWSPAPER WEB SITES: CEO Calls Free Access 'Dumb'

from this week's Editor & Publisher magazine.

by Joe Strupp

Media General Inc. plans to begin charging subscription fees for some of i ts newspaper Web sites by the end of the year, according to President, Chairman, and CEO J. Stewart Bryan III, who called free access to newspaper Web sites "dumb."

"We've come to the conclusion that [paid online subscription] is the model to follow," Bryan told E&P. "We've got to stop giving things away on the Web." [Emphasis supplied by OG.]

Bryan said no specific plan for online fees had been established, and declined to say if all of Media General's daily papers would institute subscriptions at the same time. But he said recent company research had shown that readers were leaving print newspapers for free Web products. "There is a direct relationship between hits on the Web increasing and decline in paid circulation," Bryan said.

Media General owns 25 daily newspapers, including its hometown Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune, and the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal, as well as nearly 100 weeklies and 25 TV stations.

Journal General Manager Pat Taylor said Web subscriptions make sense. "Page views we get now are high, but there's not a lot of revenue attached to it," Taylor said. "We are giving away on the Web what we are trying to sell in print."

Only a handful of newspapers charge for online subscriptions, with The Wall Street Journal the lone major daily requiring a fee.

-- Anonymous, April 23, 2001