People have been running social platforms and media companies for literal decades, after all, all while Musk was busy with cars and spaceships and whatnot. A fair number of lessons have been learned! But Musk — so resolutely convinced of his own genius — has dedicated himself to making old mistakes new again, compressing a lifetime of bad ideas into six short months.1 It’s his most reliable pattern: announce a crazy new policy, preferably on a weekend; face huge blowback from users; reverse the policy, claim you were misinterpreted all along or just pretend it never happened.

So when I saw this tweet on Saturday afternoon, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.

This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2023

Since embeds of his new longer-than-280-characters tweets don’t show the full text, here’s what it says:

Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.

This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.

Should be a major win-win for both media orgs & the public.

Fiiiiiiiiiinally, Elon turns his attention to micropayments. (Pretty sure this is in the Book of Revelation somewhere.)

The idea of news publishers charging readers by the article is not a new one. At least once an hour, someone tweets about “why hasn’t anyone figured out how to let me buy one article????” Literally dozens of micropayments-for-news startups have come and gone; dozens of publishers have run tests of various models; none have gained much traction.

Even today, well into the 2020s, you can find people saying the dream is an “iTunes for news” that — as the iTunes Store did 20 years ago — allows you to buy a single song (an article) rather than the full album (a subscription). (They say this despite the fact that approximately zero people still buy MP3s that way; instead, they pay a monthly subscription fee to Spotify or Apple.)

I’ve long been a micropayments skeptic. Not because I have any philosophical issue with the idea; I’m all for publishers making money and readers consuming news. My skepticism is driven by it being a strategy that sounds appealing but works poorly in practice. Others have written about the problems with micropayments at great length, but here are, to my mind, the most significant:

Friction at the story level.

What do people do when they hit a news site’s paywall? We have some data on that question, from a Gallup/Knight Foundation survey last fall. They asked American adults: “Suppose you were trying to access a news story online and had to pay to keep reading or watching it. Which ONE of the following would you be most likely to do?”

48% said they would “try to access the information elsewhere for free from a different news outlet.” 28% would “move on to something else or to a different news story.” 7% would “try to find information about the news story on social media.” 4% would “sign up for a free trial if available.” 3% would try to “get the story through friends or family who already have access.”

A measly 1% would “pay for access to the story or outlet.”

In the overwhelming majority of cases, a person faced with the need to pay a news site money will say “no, thank you.” You can view that as an artifact of subscription models, or you can view it as evidence of how transient most news stories are in people’s information lives. It’s hard to evaluate how much an individual article is “worth” before you’ve actually consumed it — and there is always free competition available, either on the same topic or in the broader universe of “things to click on in my feed.”

Friction at the payment level.

If an individual publisher sets up their own micropayments system, getting money will require readers setting up an account, attaching a credit card, and all the usual stuff that moving money online requires. Not many people will do that to read a single news story.

So maybe they sign on to one of the many micropayment startups that want to create an industry-wide network of news sites using a common payment platform — either as part of a pan-publisher subscription or on a pay-per-article basis. Unfortunately, none of them have the scale to be appealing or the appeal to build scale. (“Just sign up with your NewzBux account!” isn’t much of a pitch to your readers if they’ve never heard of NewzBux, or InfoCents, or FactCoins, or whatever.) And the companies that might be able to start with scale (Google, Facebook) are not ones that publishers trust with their money. And whoever owns the pipes, they’ll want their 30% cut.

Most paywalls aren’t that hard.

In a digital universe where every news story is behind a hard paywall — one impenetrable to the non-paying reader — then a micropayments model might make sense. But that’s not the digital universe we live in. The number of completely paywalled sites is low and typically either hyperlocal (a county-seat weekly with no competition) or high-end (think The Information or Politico Pro). Nearly all news sites will let a random web user read a story (or two, or five) for free. It’s only after a given number of clicks that the wall goes up.

If you want to think of that as “news sites already offer micropayments for those first five articles — they’ve just set the price at $0,” be my guest. And for those times when someone really wants to read just one article, that free allotment allows all the paywall workarounds that the savvy digital news consumer knows about. (We’re all adults here; we can talk about incognito windows.) If most paywalls aren’t that hard, there’s little pressure for a paid product to get around them on a single story.

No one agrees on what micropayments are.

Is a micropayment 10 cents for one article? That was the number Elon Musk was thinking about in this video from November, when he complained that he should be able to pay 10 cents to read an especially good Philadelphia Inquirer story despite not living in Philadelphia.

.@elonmusk describes the issue of reading articles with paywalls. In clips never shown before in our interview he alludes to the value of what Twitter can bring. He also talks about how the media wants to own their subscribers. @kgee @EliBurton_ @klwtts pic.twitter.com/WsA2lUHo0S

— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) November 1, 2022

If there is a sustainable price for journalism, it isn’t 10 cents an article. A large scale data analysis from Medill found that digital news subscribers don’t even visit those news sites on most days. For small local news sites, the typical subscriber visits once every three days. At larger sites, it’s once every five days. Those visits can include consuming multiple articles, of course, but the point is 10 cents an article would be a radical price reduction for most subscribers — and thus a radical revenue reduction for most publishers. Price points will have to be higher — and thus less appealing to fly-by readers.

Publishers don’t want to cannibalize subscribers.

It’s not at all unusual for a business to insist on their product being purchased in a particular quantity. Try to go to the grocery store and buy one peanut M&M, or one tablespoon of ice cream, or a single Corn Flake. They’ll look at you funny, because the businesses that manufacture those consumer goods have been structured around selling bags, pints, and boxes of them, respectively. Go ask the people at Tesla if you can buy a Roadster that’s only for the weekends — at 2/7ths of the price. The economics of information goods (like news) aren’t identical to those of physical goods, but they both require sustainable business models, and for most quality news sites, that requires paid subscriptions.

And that’s the root problem, from publishers’ point of view: If you sell subscriptions for $15 a month, but you sell individual articles at 15 cents each, you’re telling any subscriber who reads less than 100 articles a month they’re an idiot and should give you less money. There aren’t enough payment-willing fly-by customers to make up the difference for even a few lost subscribers. You’re encouraging your best customers to think of you as an occasional treat rather than a service you pay for — and to pause before every headline they click to estimate its worth in cash. It shouldn’t be surprising than “we’ll charge you $10 a month until you tell us to stop” is more appealing than “we’ll charge you 10 cents now and maybe you’ll come back again someday.”

As Tony Haile once smartly put it, news subscriptions are like gym memberships. Imagine a gym that charges $50 a month for a membership — but also lets anyone pop in for a single workout for two bucks. Why would anyone pay for a membership again? “If you would take the micropayments version of a gym membership, it would be like, ‘I can turn up and I can pay a couple of quid, and I can go into the gym whenever I want to use it.’ No gym works like that.”

All that said — these problems are not insurmountable. Smart people might come up with solutions, even if they haven’t so far. Indeed, I’ve long believed that if anyone could create a micropayment system for news that worked, there were only two real possibilities: Apple and Twitter.

With iPhones, iPads, and Macs, Apple controls the devices that most paying digital news consumers use. They have hundreds of millions of users’ credit cards already on file and attached to your identity. And with Apple Pay, they have a nearly frictionless payment platform that has already been integrated into countless apps and websites. If they decided to offer a “Read With Apple Pay” button for news sites, the technical problems of micropayments would mostly go away. (Along with 30% of publishers’ revenue, no doubt.) And Apple News+ is the closest thing to an all=news subscription that currently exists.2

Twitter, meanwhile, is the center of the digital news universe. There is no place online with more news-curious users clicking links to new-to-them news sites. And it showed interest in the subject, buying Tony Haile’s Scroll and integrating its network of ad-free news sites into Twitter Blue and teasing some sort of paywall integration on the way.

But that was the old Twitter. One of Musk’s first decisions after taking charge was killing off the remnants of Scroll — the closest thing to a foundation for a pan-publisher revenue model anyone had.

Unless you are one of the few Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter doesn’t have your credit card number. It has no ready payment platform for publishers to integrate into their sites. Twitter would likely only be interested in a payment system that goes through Twitter, not via links that go to a publisher site from Facebook, Google, or elsewhere.

But let’s be honest: The biggest problem is Elon. What mainstream publisher would trust Elon Musk with their money right now? The guy who refuses to pay the rent on his corporate HQ? The guy who has spent the past six months dumping on the media, banning reporters, declaring their work a “relentless hatestream” from “media puppet-masters” that you “cannot rely on…for truth“? This is the guy who says he has a “major win-win” for publishers? The same guy that complains “media is a click-machine, not a truth-machine” thinks the answer is tempting people to pay with a single headline?

(Not to mention that Musk has no deadline cred remaining, and saying that micropayments will “roll out” later this month could mean this summer, late 2024, or never.)

Maybe someone will figure out micropayments for news someday. I think it’s unlikely at scale — but I could be wrong! But I am quite confident the man who has spent the past half-year destroying the news media’s favorite online space won’t be the one to do it.

1. I believe it was Techdirt’s Mike Masnick I first saw using this metaphor for Musk, specifically around content moderation.
2. Pro tip: Apple News+ now includes, along with roughly all the magazines, The Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, The Times of London, The Globe and Mail, and the metro dailies in Charlotte, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Kansas City, Miami, Raleigh, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, plus a few more. If you run into a random local-news paywall, there’s a pretty decent chance that searching for the headline in Apple News might find it. It’s now a much better product for newspapers than it was at launch.

Well, that isn’t the only good news out of Cupertino for media companies. On Tuesday, Apple made a little-noticed announcement that app publishers could now offer special offers via discount codes.

You can now create subscription offer codes to acquire, retain, and win back subscribers. Offer codes are unique, alphanumeric codes that provide auto-renewable subscriptions at a discounted price or for free for a specific duration. Provide your one-time use codes digitally or offline at physical events, alongside products, and more. Users on iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 and later can redeem offer codes on the App Store through a one-time code redemption URL, or within your app if you’ve implemented the presentCodeRedemptionSheet API. Sales and Trends reports will be updated later this year to include information on the performance of your subscription offer codes.

That might not seem like a big deal, but it helps address one of publishers’ most common complaints about the App Store: that its pricing wasn’t flexible enough for an industry that’s found targeted discounting essential to a successful digital subscription strategy.

For example, just from clicking around various links on Twitter, I found all of these live subscription pitches from The Washington Post:

• Try one year for $100 $29
• Try 4 weeks for $1
• Subscribe for $10 $1 a month
• Try 12 weeks for $1

Each with its own marketing copy and target audience. Could I tell you how, exactly, the Post determines that you get the 4-weeks-for-$1 offer while you get the 12-weeks-for-$1 offer? Nope. But the Post has its reasons, which could be the result of deep data crunching or just an A/B test. Either way, the success of each individual offer will be tracked and used to optimize the Post’s overall subscription strategy. Maybe one offer does well with TikTok users, another is a hit with working moms, and another does well with college grads living in Sun Belt suburbs.

Similarly, if you spend any time on The Wall Street Journal’s website, you are generating a propensity-to-subscribe score, based on your activity: the articles you’ve read, the frequency of your visits, whether you’ve signed up for a newsletter, and dozens of other signals. The Journal uses that number to move its paywall around — give you fewer or more or different free articles — and to figure out what sort of offer to show you whenever you do finally hit it.

Publishers have found this level of customer intel useful because digital news subscriptions are competing with the endless stream of free news online. With zero-cost competitors always a click away, getting someone to hand over their credit card number can be a big lift. The Post, the Journal, and other papers can have those kinds of personalized offers because they have some level of control over their subscription backends — and the capacity to gather and analyze the behavioral data that informs them.

The same hasn’t been true in Apple’s App Store. When in-app subscriptions debuted in 2011, pricing was one-size-fits-all. It wasn’t until 2017 that publishers could offer introductory pricing to lure new subscribers. In 2019, it added promotional pricing that could be offered to existing or former subscribers. But targeting pricing to individual customers is limited with those options. And what little targeting is available is tied to bare-bones in-app behavior (like whether someone has canceled their subscription).

That changes with these new offer codes. An in-app subscription can have up to 10 different offers active at any one time — each with its own price point and duration. (Try one year for $29! Try 4 weeks for $1! Subscribe for $1 a month! Try 12 weeks for $1!) They can be limited by country. At the end of the introductory period, they can then be charged the normal full rate or some other price. Here’s an example of what it looks like from the developer’s perspective:

That’s all great — but the real gain is that now publishers can target these offers however they want, online or off. A newspaper could, for example, make distinct offers to:

• People who get its morning email newsletter, open it at least 50% of the time, and click through at least 20% of the time, but who still haven’t bought a subscription
• Attendees at an event it’s co-sponsoring
• Longtime print subscribers who’ve just canceled home delivery
• Shoppers at an advertiser’s store
• People who just won a contest you’ve run
• Local students and educators
• Football fans who only read your sports articles
• People who visit your website regularly but don’t live in your city
• iPhone users who have just hit the monthly-article-limit paywall for the third consecutive month
• People who follow your Instagram account or your star columnist’s TikTok
• Existing subscribers who just had a bad customer-service experience of some kind and to whom you’d like to give a discount for three months
• Twitter followers who have tweeted your articles at least four times this week

…ad infinitum. There really is no limit on how narrow you can get. (You are limited to 10 offers per subscription at any one time — but that limit is for the number of distinct pricing/duration levels you can set. You can target and distribute those 10 offers in an infinite number of ways. An app can generate 150,000 unique offer codes each calendar quarter.) And they can be distributed either as traditional offer codes (of the “enter JUSTCANCELEDPRINT at checkout” variety) or embedded in a URL, like the one in the “GET THIS OFFER NOW” button at the bottom of a marketing email. Apple also says it will give you data to track each offer’s performance.

Let’s be real: There are a lot of publishers who will have neither the data capacity nor a large-enough addressable audience for this sort of targeting to make a meaningful difference in subscriptions. Last week’s rev-share cut mostly helps smaller publishers; offer codes mostly help bigger ones. But this nonetheless means that, however sophisticated your subscription logic can be on yournewssite.com, it can be just as sophisticated in your iPhone or iPad app. That’s another win for publishers.

In-app subscriptions have always been a no-brainer for games, productivity apps, and other apps that exist only within Apple’s ecosystem. Publishers have been a harder sell, since the lion’s share of their subscriptions (print or digital) come from outside the App Store.

Nearly all news publishers have become more invested in digital subscription revenue in recent years. Apple, meanwhile, has also put more energy into subscriptions, which make up a big share of the services revenue that the company has been focused on growing the past couple of years. If that correlation means Apple will keep addressing publisher complaints and making the iPhone a more hospitable place for publishers, I don’t think they’ll hear many complaints.

1. Terms and conditions apply, as always in life! The biggest being that it only applies to publishers who generate less than $1 million a year in App Store revenue and that companies must apply for the new rate — your rev share won’t change if you don’t ask Apple for it.

At issue, really, was whether or not Apple’s 30% tax on everything flowing through its payment system was an abuse of its monopoly over installing software on iPhones and iPads. (The same, roughly speaking, applies to Google’s control of its Android app store.) The two tech giants were suddenly under increased pressure — from developers, regulators, and potentially courts — to seem less, er, extractive.

At the time, I wrote that one beneficiary of this contretemps could be news outlets. Publishers don’t produce games (usually), but they do sell plenty of monthly and annual subscriptions. And many of them do so through Apple’s payment system — often jacking up the price a few bucks to make up for Apple’s vig.

Well, well:

Apple on Wednesday announced a reduction to its longstanding App Store commission rate — one of the most substantial changes to how iOS developers earn money in the history of the iPhone maker’s digital app marketplace — as part of a new program for small businesses.

The new App Store Small Business Program, as it’s called, will allow any developer who earns less than $1 million in annual sales per year from all of their apps to qualify for a reduced App Store cut of 15 percent, half of Apple’s standard 30 percent fee, on all paid app revenue and in-app purchases.

The company says the “vast majority” of iOS app developers should be able to access the program, but Apple declined to say what percentage of its more than 28 million registered app makers would qualify. Apple also declined to specify how much of its App Store revenue would be affected by the reduced commission.

Until now, news publishers selling a subscription via the App Store have paid Apple 30% for the first year and 15% for an individual subscriber’s years after that. But, of course, every subscriber has a first year, but not all of them have a second. For a publisher who qualifies for this program, it should boost take-home revenue for a new subscriber by [launches Calculator app] a little more than 21%.

(N.B.: Complete details for eligibility are set to arrive “in early December,” so there might end up being qualifications that go beyond the $1 million number. That cutoff is for App Store revenue only, not your total revenue, so all but the largest news companies will likely be eligible. You might suddenly see companies like Gannett — which currently has 97 different apps on the App Store — redefine those apps’ “publisher” as the local daily in order to get under that $1 million bar.)

What does all this mean for publishers? Well, they’ve got a few options to consider.

• If they currently sell subscriptions in the App Store, they can just…take the money! Send Tim Cook a nice holiday card, tweet something nice about Ted Lasso, and enjoy the revenue boost.

  The Arizona Republic, for example, charges $9.99 a month for a subscription via Apple. That has meant it only got $6.99 a month, after Apple’s cut, for new subscribers. Now it’ll get $8.49.1

• If they’re currently charging more in the App Store than they do for direct subs, they can choose to narrow that gap and lower the price. For instance, The Washington Post will happily sell you a digital subscription for $10 a month directly — but if you buy it via Apple, they’ll charge you $14.99. $14.99 minus Apple’s 30% cut is $10.49; essentially, the Post is passing on Apple’s cut to the reader.

  If the Post thought it would get a lot more App Store subscribers by charging, say, $12.99, it could lower the price and end up ahead on both subscribers and revenue. (A 15% Apple cut of $12.99 would still net $11.04, more than what they were getting before.)

• If they haven’t yet offered subscriptions through Apple, the idea is now more appealing. Ever since Apple debuted iOS subscriptions in 2011, publishers have had to weigh the pros and cons.

  Pro: Subscribing to something on your iPhone is ridiculously simple — no forms to fill out, no credit card to enter, just a couple of taps. Virtually frictionless. Pro: Most of American news outlets’ best customers use iPhones.

  Con: Apple takes that cut — meaning you either just lose that revenue for the length of their subscription or you jack up the price to cover it, making it less appealing to readers. Con: You’d rather own the customer relationship yourself — so you have the knowledge of the customer in order to tailor marketing and offers, not Apple.

  Five or six years ago, most American newspapers seemed to think the cons outweighed the pros and stayed away from App Store subs. Over the past few years, as digital circulation revenue has become crucial to publishers, more have decided to dive in, if with some reluctance.

  This cut will likely convince a few more execs it’s worth the hassle to dance with Cupertino. And for those publications already in the App Store, they’ll probably feel more comfortable directing marketing toward it as a subscription option — rather than treating it as a suboptimal sidedoor they’d rather you not discover.

Whichever choice a publisher makes, this is good news. Let’s hope Google follows suit for Android.

Look at this case. Epic — by virtue of publishing the most popular and top-grossing game in the world — had about as much power as an App Store publisher can conceivably have. But Apple still wouldn’t reduce its cut of Fortnite revenues — to the point that it was willing instead to let the situation blow up into a huge public mess. And now that that mess is increasing its regulatory risk, it’s willing to do something much more systemic, like cut the rate to 15% for small app publishers. It would rather cut the rate for hundreds of thousands of publishers in half than set the precedent that one pulling a “give us a side deal or we’ll pull our content” routine gets rewarded.

Congratulations to Epic for prompting this change — even if, as a giant game publisher, it won’t directly benefit from it. The Fortnite fracas raised the broader issue of App Store monopoly in the public’s mind, and Apple responded in order to build some goodwill, get a few headlines about how it supports the little guy, and hopefully stave off regulators a little longer. That’s good for news publishers. But it should also remind them that the power relationship between the tech giants and newspapers is awfully one-sided.

1. Note: These are hypothetical examples. It may be that the Republic or the Post are above the $1 million in App Store revenue and thus won’t be eligible for this new cut. I would certainly hope the Post is there, at least.

Now: Can it do the same for podcasts?

Spotify is reportedly considering a subscription service just for its podcasts, a segment it’s invested in heavily the past couple of years. It was originally spotted by Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein

Looks like the premium podcast plan would be ad-free and some mix of exclusive extra content at price points somewhere between $3-$8. pic.twitter.com/ArK8xYg0CM

— Andrew Wallenstein (@awallenstein) November 6, 2020

The various options being subjected to Qualtricsification range from $2.99 to $7.99 a month. They all involve access to some variety of exclusive content — with or without ads, with or without early access.

Will it work? It’s hard to bet against Spotify, which has played the game very well in its growth from Stockholm startup to 144 million paying subscribers in 92 countries. But there are a number of things that make a podcast subscription service a significantly tougher sell than music was.

You’re competing with free and easy.

Music has been for sale for more than a century, dating back to sheet music and player piano rolls. When Napster & Co. came along, free music was thrilling, but also confusing and unreliable to many. More importantly, music companies were highly motivated to sue P2P file-sharing services into the ground, which they accomplished with Napster and most of its peers. A few high-profile, high-dollar lawsuits against random schmoes who downloaded a samizdat copy of The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album went a long way toward discouraging P2P. So when Steve Jobs and Apple came along with 99-cent downloads — straightforward, legal, tied to the explosive growth of the iPod — the market was ready for it.

Podcasts are different. Podcasts have been free by default for as long as they’ve existed. There are plenty of apps that make the acts of subscribing, downloading, and listening to podcasts straightforward. That’s hard to compete with. Imagine if, when Spotify first launched, there was already a free product that gave you access to all the world’s music — but Spotify said that, for $9.99 a month, you could also get this super-good tier of premium, exclusive music. If the choices are “98% of the world’s music for free” and “100% of the world’s music for $9.99/month,” most people are going to be happy with the free option.

You know who else thought they had content that was awesome enough to get subscribers, despite an endless sea of free competition? Quibi.

Previous attempts haven’t gone too well.

The poster child for paid podcasting is Luminary, which launched to much excitement (and then much annoyance) last spring. It hasn’t taken off: Despite raising at least $130 million from investors, Luminary had only 80,000 paying subscribers one year in, Bloomberg reported.

But others have tried, too. Audible Channels, launched in 2016 and backed by both the might of Amazon and Audible’s audiobook dominance, never got very far. Stitcher Premium has been around for nearly four years and hasn’t set the world on fire. (It was recently bought by SiriusXM, which has its own established paid model.)

Things can change, of course. There wasn’t much of a market for paid digital news until The New York Times put up a paywall, after all, and it took the better part of a decade to really get that business whirring. But at this point, there’s been very little evidence of a market that’s just itching to pay for podcasts.

Podcasts don’t play well with each other in a subscription.

People need to be at least somewhat passionate about a podcast to want to pay for it. They need to think that its absence from their lives would be bad enough to merit 2 or 5 or 10 bucks a month. But those passions are hard to stretch across a broad-based subscription. If Spotify’s premium package includes, say, 40 shows, what share of them is any individual user going to be passionate about? HBO had to establish a reputation for quality and exclusivity — the idea that an “HBO show” was a thing — to get subscribers. Netflix had to have a huge library of existing TV shows and movies that weren’t easily available elsewhere, and then its own catalog of exclusives. A package of premium podcasts is likely to be less coherent editorially than, say, the package of premium stories you get with a subscription to The New York Times.

The subscription model is less congruent with the ad model than in other media formats.

In the digital news business, most smart publishers know not to be too reliant on a single revenue type. If you’re all about advertising, you’re subject to the vagaries of the ad market and constantly worried about attracting new audience. If you’re all about subscriptions, you risk dropping out of the public conversation and making it harder for people to sample your wares.

But news sites can generally pull this off because the two types of revenue come from two different audiences. At most, the majority of pageviews they get — and thus the majority of ad impressions they serve — come from users who click on one or two stories a month. They’re unlikely to be candidates for a subscription, but you can monetize them in this other way. Your subscribers, meanwhile, are your superfans — the 2% or 3% of your uniques who come back all the time and consume dozens or hundreds of stories a month.

What lets these two models coexist? The metered paywall. If you don’t put up a “Subscribe Now!” until someone’s fifth article, you’re letting the grazers be while serving them ads. And you’re identifying your potential superfans — those who hit 5 or 10 or however many articles.

It’s not clear how well that sort of model can work with podcasts. Limiting someone to, say, two premium episodes a month is a higher bar, technologically and in terms of marketing, that a clear free/paid split. And podcast audiences tend to be more loyal than news site readers: They subscribe to individual shows and listen to a large share of the episodes that get delivered to them, which is a level of commitment far greater than clicking a random link on Twitter.

All of that means, I think, that a podcast subscription model would make it very hard to successfully monetize those shows with advertising — which is the way nearly all podcasts are monetized. News sites could work both angles; podcasts will find that tougher.

Spotify, of course, would enter this business with a ton of advantages. It has a massive existing userbase to market to. It already charges more than 100 million credit cards every month. It’s spent a ton of money buying up high-value content, whether that’s The Ringer, Gimlet, or its exclusive distribution deal with The Joe Rogan Show.

Those are all advantages, and betting against Spotify has not typically been a good call over the past decade. But it’s still not clear the market’s there — whether at Spotify’s scale or even something smaller.

As of Sept. 30, its number of digital news subscribers was up 45.9 percent over the previous year. Even better were its “other” digital subscriptions (mostly Games and Cooking), which were up 63.6 percent. (That nomenclature is a change, by the way: What the Times has for decades called “Crosswords” is now broadened to “Games” in the company’s filings. Spelling Bee remains on the march.) Print subs, meanwhile, were down 3.9 percent.

In all, that’s a year-over-year increase of more than 2 million digital subscriptions. (It took the Times more than four years from the launch of its digital paywall to hit 2 million subscribers total. Now that’s one year’s haul.) The Times added 393,000 digital subscribers in the quarter.

Subscription revenues increased 12.6 percent to $301 million and digital-only products revenue increased 34 percent to $155.3 million, making digital readership the only source of growth for The Times this quarter. Print subscription revenue decreased 3.8 percent to $145.7 million “largely due to lower retail newsstand revenue, while revenue from our domestic home delivery subscription products grew 2.5 percent.” Advertising remains a giant mess, down 12.6 percent in digital, an astonishing 46.5 percent in print, and 30.2 percent overall.

At the same time, product development costs were up 27.9 percent compared to Q3 2019, which the Times attributes to the increase of digital product development employees in connection with its subscription strategy.

The earnings report reflects what many of us had hoped would be true for the news industry: Subscriber-first strategies and investing in high-quality journalism are profitable. And despite the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic and nearly five years of constant attacks on the news media by the president, the Times projects a 14 percent increase in total subscription revenue in the fourth quarter vs. 2019, as well as a 35 percent increase in digital-only subscription revenue. The Times is well on its way to meet its goal of 10 million subscribers by 2025 and well on its way to make its digital journalism its core revenue stream.

“The continued demand for quality, original, independent journalism across a range of topics makes us even more optimistic about the size of the total market for digital journalism subscriptions and our position in it,” Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said today.

You can read the full announcement here.

New York Times now has more than 7 million subscribers. Digital subs business is growing at 34%. But ads continue to drop, both print and digital. ($nyt q3 earnings beat on top and bottom line)

Also noteworthy: there's $800mm in $$ on the balance sheet:https://t.co/8VZt2HlYnU

— Edmund Lee (@edmundlee) November 5, 2020

NYT ad sales are down. I would imagine that is going to flip in next year or so. With all those subs and all that data, should be easy to build a unique ad offering to clients. https://t.co/sH8uBZsRgH

— Jay Yarow (@jyarow) November 5, 2020

The New York Times: We STILL suck at failing. https://t.co/BCiZjOQUJv

— John Schwartz (@jswatz) November 5, 2020

The Times bet that by sustaining quality, rather than slashing staff, it could thrive. Maybe only the Times could make that formula work so well, but how I wish more newspapers had tried it. https://t.co/15N6PWiQjD

— Robert Bianco (@BiancoRobert) November 5, 2020

I think the drop in ad revenue is good. Then pressure to generate clicks for ads is lessened… I think.
…
New York Times Hits 7 Million Subscribers as Digital Revenue Rises – The New York Times https://t.co/f5JH0YMNxv pic.twitter.com/I8JVhKPJjI

— Mike Harley, Goblin Herder (@obsolete29) November 5, 2020

But we do have an interesting set of data points that can give us a more nuanced perspective of what it’s like to run an American newspaper company in 2020. And we have the bankruptcy of the nation’s No. 2 chain, McClatchy, to thank for it.

McClatchy’s bankruptcy is coming to a close; its chief lender and stockholder Chatham Asset Management has won an auction for the company and now only needs court approval. The price tag is believed to be in the neighborhood of $300 million — which would mean that the professional fees McClatchy paid during bankruptcy equaled roughly 1/10th of the entire company’s value.

Given that Chatham is taking the company private — and that any potential return to the stock market would involve merging into some other consolidator — these may well be the last real financials we ever see from McClatchy.

Combined with previous earnings reports, they show a company that has managed the digital transition better than most; at last public count, it was making nearly half of its ad revenue in digital, and digital subscriptions were up 45 percent year-over-year.

They show a company that was able to be operationally profitable while still doing good journalism.

But they also show a company so laden with 14-year-old debt that it had to enter Chapter 11. A company that is trading 163 years of family stewardship for a hedge fund that also owns the National Enquirer. And a company, like all of its industry peers, that got walloped by a virus it had no control over.

In an email to his staff, editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced:

We have never, in the 163-year history of this magazine, had an audience like we had in March: 87 million unique visitors to our site, and more than 168 million pageviews. The number of unique visitors is astonishing — more than double the previous one-month record. But the most notable statistic, the one with possibly the greatest salience for The Atlantic’s future, is this: Your work has brought in more than 36,000 new subscribers over the past four weeks, even as we have lifted paywall restrictions on our coronavirus coverage.

Those traffic numbers are very impressive. To put them in context, 87 million uniques is not far off what The New York Times (118 million in January, per Comscore), Fox News (104 million), The Washington Post (92 million), or the Daily Mail (89 million) might get in a normal, non-COVID-19 month. (The Atlantic’s media kit cites 33.7 million uniques as of a year ago, March 2019.)

But it really is that “36,000 new subscribers” number that truly stands out. There are news sites in The Atlantic’s peer group that would be thrilled with 36,000 digital subscribers period, much less added in a single virus-wrecked month.

The Atlantic relaunched its metered paywall last September. Readers are given five free articles per month before being asked to choose an annual subscription option: $49.99 for digital access, $59.99 for digital and a print subscription, or $100 for a “premium” option that includes print and digital, ad-free browsing, and other member perks. (The premium option absorbed “The Masthead,” a membership option designed for “die hards.”)

Unfortunately, when I spoke with Goldberg, he wasn’t ready to discuss overall subscription numbers, other than to characterize them as “very good” — so we don’t know what sort of relative increase those 36,000 represent. He said The Atlantic saw a spike in subscriptions when the paywall launched in September, followed by “steady growth” in the following months, with bumps after a redesign in November and around the holidays, when it saw an increase in bundled digital/print subscriptions.

But now, with the magazine’s much-lauded coronavirus coverage driving record-breaking traffic, “We’ve moved into another category entirely.”

Goldberg acknowledged that — “like every other company in America” — The Atlantic is under stress from the coronavirus crisis. Still, he confessed, the boost in subscribers has brought some relief.

“Look, this was — and remains — a source of anxiety for me,” said Goldberg, who succeeded James Bennet as editor-in-chief in 2016. “I’ve been arguing for a long time that we will be saved as an institution by bearing down on quality, quality, quality. Just do the most deeply reported, beautifully written, carefully edited, fact-checked, copyedited, and beautifully designed stories — and the reader will come. They want to be supportive and they want access. And it turns out to be true. Thank God for it.”

About a third of the new 36,000 include both digital and print, the rest just digital. Goldberg said they were undiscounted and individually sold, not the result of any bulk or institutional deal: “One by one by one by one,” he confirmed.

To put that number in context, Slate is at 60K subs for Slate Plus after *six* years. Quartz is at around 13K members 16 months in.

Different products, sure, but adding 36K in four weeks is kinda otherworldly.

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) April 2, 2020

Goldberg said it’s the magazine’s “most ambitious journalism” that has been disproportionately converting readers into subscribers, citing work by Ed Yong, James Hamblin, Kaitlyn Tiffany, Sarah Zhang, Yascha Mounk, and others.

Yong, on a recent Longform episode, said his editors had told him to forget 800-word updates and focus on taking “the biggest possible swing.” (He paused his book leave in mid-March to cover the virus.) One of the largest efforts to track state-by-state coronavirus numbers grew out of work by The Atlantic’s Rob Meyer and Alexis Madrigal. The ambitious approach has made The Atlantic’s coronavirus journalism distinctive and extended their coverage’s digital shelf life despite a rapidly evolving crisis.

The Atlantic decided to drop the paywall for a collection of coronavirus coverage — including blockbuster pieces like Yong’s “How the Pandemic Will End” — but the site still features prompts to “support this vital reporting” with a subscription on each page. Some other coronavirus stories — from an advice column on preparing children for coronavirus changes to an op-ed on the pandemic’s effect on American diplomacy — still count toward paywall limits, though.

“We’ve prioritized free access to the stories that can help people make decisions that keep them safe, physically and mentally, as well the stories holding officials accountable for failures related to the virus,” said Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. (Semi-disclosure: Adrienne is a former Nieman Lab staffer, and our alumni are fairly thick on the ground at The Atlantic.)

Some subscribers have credited the redesign — which Goldberg called “the most dramatic new look for our magazine in its 162-year history” upon its unveiling — for their support. “Historically, The Atlantic has leaned on the strength of the word,” Goldberg said. “The revolution here was that we found a great creative director, Peter Mendelsund, who understood that the job of design and the art was to make it easier to see and understand the words — not to get in the way of them.”

“I get it — I’m the baker praising his own bread,” Goldberg added. “But it really is beautiful. It’s a delight.”

Many news organizations are seeing record-breaking traffic right now, but Goldberg feels The Atlantic has been able to capitalize on the surge by having the redesign, its paywall architecture, and new systems of “high-touch copyediting and fact-checking” on digital stories in place to take advantage.

The Trump era, he noted, had helped to prepare his staff.

“I feel like our journalists are doing so well in the pandemic coverage because we’ve been practicing for this kind of high-intensity, highly fraught journalism for three years now,” said Goldberg, who recalled telling his staff they were built for the moment, as he had after the November 2016 elections. “It’s not as if we went from a normal period in American life to a completely abnormal one. It was pretty abnormal a couple of months ago too.”

The latest vows column is a whopper. https://t.co/8TpFYff0J8

— Laura June (@laura_june) September 25, 2019

The photo made me think they got married? Which I guess they kinda did? It’s super Vows-looking. Congratulations. https://t.co/GaUMezD3XE

— Lisa Tozzi (@lisatozzi) September 25, 2019

Congratulations to @Vox and @NYMag on their wedding, tastefully chronicled in the NYT Vows section oh wait https://t.co/HrwRIniqPe

— Christine Emba (@ChristineEmba) September 25, 2019

Looks like a photo for a Vows column. https://t.co/ehuoupcjdh

— katie rosman (@katierosman) September 25, 2019

(That reaction is a not-so-subtle reminder of how unusual it still is to see a 41-year-old woman leading the sort of high-profile company whose acquisition would be deemed worth a business-section story.)

Vox Media is, of course, one of the largest and most successful digital-native publishers, the autocomplete that pops up if you type “buzzfeed vice” anywhere on the Internet. Built out of sports site SB Nation and later expanded to include The Verge, Vox, Eater, and more, Vox Media has historically thought of itself as the Condé Nast of the Internet: a collection of premium, subject-specific media brands that can do high-gloss editorial and attract high-end audiences, but with the technology and product chops that come from growing up online. It’s the most print-like of the big digitals; you can see the DNA of magazine layout in some of its designs, and its mix of both editorial big swings and webbier front-of-book content brings along some print editorial values.

New York is, of course, the storied magazine that grew out of the late New York Herald Tribune under the guidance of editorial legend Clay Felker. It’s a city magazine in name and attitude. But like its peers at The New Yorker and The New York Times — it both reflects New York and uses it as a jumping-off point for writing smartly about anything and everything. And like the Times and New Yorker, that has given it the ability to adapt its identity to the Internet in ways most local print outlets can’t. Under the editorial leadership of Adam Moss, it launched a series of digital editorial brands with no explicit connection to New York but which took advantage of the magazine’s strengths — most notably the culture site Vulture and the fashion/style site The Cut, which for my money is the smartest “women’s” site online. (Its readers’ median household income? $186,797.) As long ago as 2010, David Carr could describe New York as “fast becoming a digital enterprise with a magazine attached.” It’s probably the webbiest of the major print-born media companies.

So the most print-like digital publisher is joining up with the most digital of print publishers. While this is being framed as an acquisition (with no dollar amounts released), it’s not hard to see why it might look like…a happy marriage. Substantial audience overlap, similar editorial values, strong reputations for quality — these crazy kids might pull it off!

You can see how the two sides are framing the meet-cute here (with a photo that even meets the Vows rule about even eye levels):

We have long admired (and often envied) each other’s businesses, which revealed themselves to be uniquely complementary as we quickly moved from exploratory conversations, through diligence, to an agreement. Sharing values, we found our capabilities — each excelling in different areas, with little overlap — naturally and seamlessly fitting together. New York Media is an exemplar of groundbreaking journalism, with a smart, trenchant voice, that has turned a 51-year-old print magazine into an inventive multiplatform company that punches well above its weight. Vox Media’s authority, spirit of innovation, and foundation in technology and communities, together with its visionary approach to expansion, diversification, and growth, have set it apart from other media companies that have risen in the past decade.

Let’s take a look at this pairing — what works and what might not.

Distinct paywall models. Just like everyone else, both companies are chasing direct revenue from readers, but they’ve had different approaches. Vox Media has been relatively cautious, experimenting with things like the Vox Video Lab. Bankoff said this spring there would be some further membership/paywall moves “later this year.”

Meanwhile, New York went all-in on a metered paywall late last year, at $5 a month. Interestingly, it’s a subscription that cuts across all of New York’s verticals — even though there are dedicated Vulture readers who have no interest in The Cut, Grub Street partisans with no time for Intelligencer, and so on.

I enjoy a lot of New York content, but I confess I haven’t ponied up those five bucks. As I wrote last year, it’s harder for magazine and magazine-like digital properties to make a subscription pitch, given that they are often a news consumer’s second read after the Times, the Post, or some other more full-service publisher. But a subscription that includes not only those New York sites…but also Vox, The Verge, SB Nation, et cetera? That’s a stronger pitch, even if it means divvying up the money among more sites. (Wasserstein said today that one of the areas of “new potential” she’s most interested in is “subscription businesses across this entire portfolio.”)

Think for a minute of the nascent streaming wars — Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu being joined by Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max, ad infinitum. Knowing that consumers are unlikely to pay for lots of individual channels piecemeal, each company is trying to recreate the old cable bundle in its own way. (Are Marvel movies not enough to get you to sign up for Disney+? Well then, how about Toy Story? Or The Simpsons? National Geographic? Frozen? Yoda? Do you like Yoda? You seem like someone who’d like Yoda. What if we threw in ESPN+ and Hulu too?) They know that, given the sea of free content available and the incumbents’ advantage, it’ll take a diverse catalog of content to get people to pony up for access to the whole package.

When the digital publishing business was mostly about advertising, the purpose of moar scale was primarily about cutting backend costs and being able to do deals with a higher grade of advertiser. But as it shifts more toward subscription, moar scale is also about assembling a big-enough and diverse-enough bundle of content to appeal to a bigger audience. Sites have gotten pretty good at getting their superfans to buy a digital subscription. But there aren’t enough superfans. Yes, there are people who loooooooove The Cut. But there are probably more who only like The Cut — and also like Vox and The Verge and Vulture.

That’s an opportunity mergers like this can provide. This is a critical distinction from the print-era Condé Nast, where a Vogue subscriber had no reason to care that the same company published Golf Digest and GQ. Magazine-style content, but newspaper-style bundle.

(Side note: Vox Media and New York were two of only a handful of digital publishers who agreed to be part of the premium Apple News Plus bundle, in which they get some infinitesimal cut of Apple’s subscription revenue. Better to build the bundle than to be bundled by someone else.)

I like this deal. I like both companies involved and how they fit together. I like that there’s a legitimate growth story to be told, not just a cut-until-you-hit-profit one — which is the narrative most American newspapers are facing, unfortunately.

I’m sure roadblocks will pop up along the way, at all levels of the new operation. But I think these two have a real shot at making it work — maybe even growing old together. And the kids will probably be cute.

After announcing a batch of new and expanded departments in March, Journal leadership is in the midst of turning its plans into action. Louise Story, the director of newsroom strategy, led the squad in putting together the vision.

(You may remember her from her work over 11 years and a certain innovation report at The New York Times, and/or from her blip of a time as a potential managing editor at the Los Angeles Times caught in the Lewis D’Vorkin crossfire.)

“If you want to move on something, it’s good to have people whose job specifically it is to do that. We have had people who have ongoing efforts around new audiences, such as professional women, but it hasn’t been a full-time job for anyone” — yet, Story said. “Think of [the interactions between the new teams] as an incubator in the middle of newsroom helping us change and progress.”

A round of changes

The revamp of the Journal’s strategy coincides with a changing of the guard and new extensions of Journal content into other environments. Editor-in-chief Matt Murray, a longtime Journal reporter and editor, replaced Gerard Baker 13 months ago. (Baker reportedly wasn’t a favorite among Journal journalists, some of whom questioned his editorial choices in Trump coverage. Someone in the newsroom tells me now the “mood, generally, is very good. I think most of us trust and respect Matt.”) In 2016, under Baker, the Journal offered all staff buyouts and restructured the print sections thanks to eternally disappointing print ad revenue. The Journal also laid off some staffers in 2017, though it’s still unclear how many.

This month, the Journal announced a deal with Bloomberg to put Dow Jones content on the terminal, and the outlet is also a launch partner for Apple News+ (a spot The Washington Post and The New York Times declined to focus on its own subscription efforts). The Journal said it would “be hiring around 50 additional newsroom staffers” to meet the needs of Apple’s premium offering.

(An update on the Great Digital Subscriber Race among the major national newspapers: The Journal currently has 1,818,000 digital subs, up from 1.5 million in January, and 2,617,000 subs total, including print. The New York Times has 2,988,000 people paying for digital access to its news product — 3,780,000 if you add in its cooking and crosswords products. The Washington Post, which does not share numbers as frequently, had more than 1.5 million digital subs in December. Want a broader set of data points? See the charts in this piece about the Los Angeles Times’ 170,000 digital subscribers.)

“There’s a lot of change at the Journal right now and it’s all rooted in us wanting to increase the impact of our journalism to share our reporting with more people,” Story said. (And to build the Journal into a habit for potential subscribers.)

New strategic targets

Nearly all news organizations are recognizing the need to expand their offerings and become more relatable to more people — so more people, um, are more likely to give them more money if they ask for it. The Journal’s rising departments are a strong signal of exactly where and how the 130-year-old news outlet is seeing the next lifetime. It involves journalism as a public good, a refrain commonly recited in nonprofit news circles like at the American Journalism Project but a little surprising at a financial news-focused broadsheet.

Story described one effort as such: “The new audiences group is going to focus on an initiative around professional women [and] financial literacy which is providing information about money to be helpful to people, even people who may or may not subscribe but really providing information as a public good.”

The organization is trying to reconfigure its systems by building this hub of innovation infused in the newsroom. Here are the departments, with some elaborations drawn from the March memo.

Young Audiences

This team will expand “on the success our colleagues in Membership have had in growing our college subscriber audience.” Teen-driven Rookie Magazine’s Lauren Redding and Ethar El-Katatney of AJ+ are leading it. A job description for a young audiences editor teased a new outlet for this group’s work:

The Wall Street Journal seeks a New York-based editor to oversee a multi-disciplinary team that will be creating a digital magazine meant to appeal to the growing base of readers in their 20s who already subscribe to the Journal, as well as other younger people who are looking to connect with meaningful journalism.

The magazine is digital-focused and will include journalism in all mediums — including text, graphics and video — but some of its work will also run in the newspaper periodically. The online magazine will feature content originated by this team, content curated from around the Journal as well as content created with direct participation from journalists around the Journal’s newsroom. Though it’s aimed at the Journal’s up-and-coming audience, the content will be conceived of broadly to recognize the diversity of interests and tastes of the large audience it will serve.

The digital magazine is a major project originating from the Journal’s strategy department, which is an incubator for new technologies, audience growth, community and news innovation. The department includes the full range of journalistic talent that makes the Journal one of the leading news organizations in the world — writers, video journalists, graphics designers, editors, product managers, engineers, designers, data scientists, artificial intelligence experts and more — in a lively, collaborative project to discover new offerings of journalistic value. The editorial director of the digital magazine will be a close collaborator with other leaders in the strategy department, as well as leaders of the broader newsroom.

There aren’t many times a major publication starts a new content initiative of this aspiration, and this role offers the right candidate the chance to envision something new along with a fresh team with expertise in writing, editing, video, graphics, design, product and engineering. Also within this team is a new initiative to solicit journalism submissions from people in their 20s. We are open to extensions in newsletters and welcome ideas of how to create a community of young people connecting over thoughtful content.

A Journal spokesperson clarified that it will be a media-agnostic content-creating team. But perhaps it’s not the content format but the kind of content that should be kept in mind:

I get this is the opinion page, but it is also the kind of thing that makes people under 40 not feel bad about not subscribing to a newspaper. pic.twitter.com/bGfzEoQM9o

— Damon Kiesow (@dkiesow) July 27, 2019

New Audiences

A job listing for a product designer describes the role on the New Audience team as “work[ing] with cross-disciplinary teams to create new products and content for young people or for other new audiences.” A job posting for the group’s editor said it “will be an important voice in figuring out steps for the Journal as it seeks to become more relevant to women and diverse groups, and as we seek for more of our coverage to be more known by these groups.” The listing looked for “someone with a lens on women: What are they obsessed with right now? And how do they find their content?”

Ebony Reed, recently of the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the AP, has taken the reins. (Her responsibilities include focusing on the financial literacy project for professional women, “future initiatives for minority groups,” and keeping track of the diversity of people quoted and displayed in stories and photographs.)

Awesome first day @WSJ. So excited to be here as New Audiences Chief and working with smart, amazing colleagues in newsroom strategy. The energy is amazing! @louisestory @fpmarconi @laurentredding @etharkamal

— Ebony Reed (@EbonyReed) July 22, 2019

Membership Engagement

This group has three teams: one focused on SEO, another on newsletters and other content formats, and the third diving into the recently revamped comments system. (Remember, they’re conversations with audience voice reporters now, not comments with moderators.) This spring, the Journal tested a calendar for readers to get notified on analyst expectations. Edward Hyatt joined the Journal from News UK as the new SEO editor.

Newsroom Innovation

This group grows out of the Journal newsroom’s submissions to its Idea Portal, which is “a place anyone in the newsroom can submit an idea and also see which ideas are taken up and why. The ideas are evaluated by a committee that is open to the newsroom.” The portal, besides having a fun name reminiscent of brain travel, is a way to get all staff engaged with innovation. “If you want to help turn a big ship, and the Journal is a big place, it’s important to have transparency and to let everyone see what’s going on so they can row in the same direction,” Story said. According to the March memo, the team will have a high representation of product designers and engineers. Story and Murray are still hiring for an innovation chief, but John Schimmel is back at the Journal as the director of engineering for newsroom innovation after two years in The New York Times’ new products group. (The Times is hiring for entrepreneurs-in-residence, if you’re curious about their product guidelines.) BBC News Lab product developer Pietro Passarelli is also joining the team.

Data Solutions

This one aims to “go to the next level in audience data analytics.” (Talk about brain travel.) Ross Fadely is now the Journal’s data sciences chief, coming from a professional education company helping people transition into data science-related roles, with a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Story gave an idea of one potential metric the Journal could use: “If someone was trying to see whether a headline, photo, or choice of a story topic were good, it would be important to not just look at pageviews. You’d put pageviews in the numerator and put impressions of the story in the denominator, so that impressions would be the number of people who had the chance to open it and pageviews would be the number of people who did open.”

The final department involved here is the existing R&D branch, which is getting an expansion. It’s led by Francesco Marconi and is adding Alyssa Zeisler, Erin Riglin, and Eric Bolton. They’ll focus on machine learning and we’ve shared some of the team’s lessons already, such as on deepfakes and algorithmic reporting. (Reminder: The Post is launching a three-to-six-person lab for computational political journalism this fall.) “The R&D team is now the legacy team,” Story said. It was established one year ago, but hey, we can let the 130-year-old paper have it.

While the leadership is mostly filled out, the Journal is still hiring for its dozens of practitioners and many of the initiatives will be in full swing by the middle of the fall. “All of the ways we’re evaluating success have to do with our focus on our audience and being useful and relevant to our audience with our reporting and journalism,” Story said.

They’re not the only ones trying to build out a data science and audience engagement powerhouse in order to get to subscriber dollars first. While local newspapers are competing what our Ken Doctor has called the 2019 Consolidation Games, the big national dailies are all going full-throttle in the Great Digital Subscriber Race.

You see, other than the two nationals aimed at niche audiences — The Wall Street Journal for business types, USA Today for people staying at the Days Inn by the airport — pretty much all American newspapers used to be recognizably in the same business. Take a look, for instance, at print circulation numbers for an assortment of big dailies in 2002, before the web hath wrought what it wrought:

You can see The New York Times at No. 1 and The Washington Post at No. 3 — but the L.A. Times slots solidly in between them. Closer to the top spot than to the Post, actually. And the other metro papers have circulation levels vaguely commensurate with the size of their cities and markets — smaller than the coastal giants, sure, but still big.

Now look at the same table, but with a new column added: how many digital subscriptions each newspaper has today.1

Pretty different, right?

This is, fundamentally, the problem facing local and regional dailies. There is a business to be had selling digital subscriptions to newspapers. But it’s a business dominated by two papers on the East Coast. (Again, I’m excluding the Journal for my purposes here, but they’d make three.) Papers that used to have competitive scale in print — where the limitations of physical distribution gave them market power — just aren’t able to play on the same field as the big boys in digital. That’s the barbell shape: a couple heavyweights on one end of the spectrum, a lot of small fry on the other, no one in between.

That’s what makes the L.A. Times such an interesting and important case. It used to literally be in between those two I-95 papers, after all, and with Soon-Shiong’s limitless capital, it could make a vigorous effort to squeeze itself into that other duopoly. If the L.A. Times could do it — with resources, ambition, a ton of smart hires, and its California competition on its heels — maybe it could then inform the strategies of the industry’s next tier down. Will the L.A. Times be the nation’s biggest metro paper or its smallest, scrappiest national one?

All of that is what makes this news, first reported last night by Poynter, is so depressing:

Digital subscriptions at the Los Angeles Times are way below expectations, and leadership, in a memo to staff, said the future of the paper could depend on solving the issue rapidly.

Whether due to unrealistic expectations or editorial and business failures, the Times is nowhere close to meeting its digital subscription goal. The Times had hoped to double its digital subscriptions from just more than 150,000 to 300,000 this year — a number that would have to be doubled again, the memo said, to come close to covering editorial costs. But midway through the year, the Times is nowhere near that number, having netted only 13,000 digital subscriptions in 2019.

In a memo sent to staff on Monday afternoon and obtained by Poynter, Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine and Managing Editor Scott Kraft wrote, “Our future depends on rapid and substantial subscription revenue growth.” They added, “Performance for the first half of the year … has been disappointing.”

The memo said that the Times added 52,000 digital subscriptions, but “significant cancellations during the same stretch” left the Times with a net increase of only 13,000. (A current online offer is 99 cents for the first month and $2 per week after that, or about $100 a year.)

Yeesh — that is unfortunate.

In its defense: The L.A. Times launched into this new era with a lot of technical debt (clunky systems inherited from and still intertwined with Tronc) that it’s still working to pay off. And the entire operation had been beaten down as much as any over the past dozen years. Just listing the litany of horrors makes me sad: the Sam Zell/Randy Michaels era, the four-year bankruptcy, Michael Ferro, layoffs, Ross Levinsohn, the D’Vorkin interregnum, an escorted-out editor, did I mention Michael Ferro, and that video.

But from that low point, the Times has invested in the newsroom and done an awful number of things right, so to see this sort of subscription result is really disappointing. It’s also a reminder that getting digital subscriptions right isn’t just about getting people in the door — it’s about keeping them there.

The mainstream American newspaper paywall — which dates to 2011, when The New York Times put up its metered version — has gone through a series of evolutions. Pricing, which started high in some markets, has mostly settled at about $10 a month or $100 a year. The number of stories free to non-subscribers has dropped — from 20 at the Times’ launch in 2011 to 10 to 5, even as low as 2 (or 0!) in some markets.

But once you get all those subscribers signed up, you’ve got to prove yourself worthy of their money, over and over again. Churn has always been an issue for newspapers, but it’s even more of one in a world of constant competition for subscription dollars. (“Hmm, Netflix raised their price — do I really use that L.A. Times subscription?”) Retention is critical to making reader revenue the bedrock of the new business model; one newspaper found that half of its new subscribers left within three months — but that after that point, the departure rate dropped under 2 percent a month. You’ve got to get around that corner.

So what gets you there?

• It’s frequent messaging that reminds readers of the value of their subscription — both the practical value and the values that buttress the case for supporting local media.
• It’s building out unique subscriber-only experiences that make them feel they’ve got an inside pass to something important.
• It’s not just creating great journalism — it’s making sure that the great journalism gets seen by the people who’d enjoy or derive value from it.
• It’s using customer data to determine what, exactly, an individual reader finds valuable about what you produce and making sure they come into contact with it as often as possible.
• It’s constructing tools that increase the frequency of a reader’s contact with the paper — email newsletters, weekly podcasts, smart news alerts, the right pushes for weekend content, and anything else that builds habit, the most important predictor of subscription propensity.

I’m not saying people at the Los Angeles Times don’t know all of this; of course they do, and they’re investing resources into it. Maybe the infrastructure is nearly built and a turnaround is near. But signing up 52,000 new subscribers — while losing 39,000 existing ones over the same span — strongly suggests that there’s more work to do there.

Let me also speak from experience here. I bought a digital subscription to the L.A. Times on March 20 — both to see what sort of work they’re doing and to support the idea of another big ambitious newspaper newsroom in America.

I just searched through my email: I have not received a single email from the Times in those months since promoting a breaking story, a feature, a benefit, or a reason I should be happy to be a subscriber. No email from the editor telling me about the great work they’re doing and how my subscription dollars made it all possible. Not one.

Instead, I get one email every morning from the Times with a picture of the front page and the same subject line every day: “Your eNewspaper has arrived.” That’s it. (I don’t even remember signing up for it — I’m not an “eNewspaper” kind of guy. But maybe I did.)

I’m sure the Times has published a bazillion stories I’d love to read in the past four-plus months. But I find the ones I do read the same way I did before — seeing a link on Twitter.

If I was a borderline L.A. Times subscriber, it would be very easy for me to see my subscription as disposable right now. I haven’t been told or shown why it’s useful to me. And apparently, I’m not alone.

(Allow me one other selfish sidenote: Patrick Soon-Shiong has said that his eventual goal for the L.A. Times is to have 5 million digital subscribers. A target that outsized shows the ambition he brings to the project — but as big as metro L.A. is, there are not going to be 5 million digital subscribers there. There are not going to be 5 million digital subscribers in all of California. If those ambitious goals are ever going to be reached, they’ll have to convince a lot of people far from El Segundo — nationwide, worldwide — it’s worth paying for. That’s a lot of people who currently have very little attachment to or even experience with the L.A. Times. Building useful editorial points of entry for people who love great reporting and are interested in California but don’t live there should be near the top of the to-do list.)

If the L.A. Times wants to be in the same conversation as those East Coast guys, they might want to look at what their peers are doing when it comes to retention. The New York Times has an entire team dedicated to it; 10 people are dedicated just to new subscribers’ first 90 days. Here’s a bit from an interview last year with the retention team’s then-head, Ben Cotton:

We are in charge of everything that happens to a New York Times reader after he or she becomes a subscriber. We have another team in Consumer Revenue focused on acquisition that’s trying to get people who are readers to read more and eventually convert to become a subscriber. The moment they do, my team takes over.

We are responsible for everything from the first onboarding email you get right after you become a subscriber telling you about the Times and what you get with a Times subscription, through the times that you’re contacting us by phone or chat or email for customer service reasons, all the way up to the point that you decide to cancel, although we hope that you obviously decide not to cancel.

Between all of that, we are responsible for retention and engagement marketing — so doing marketing to our customer base to try to make sure that they’re seeing all the best things that the Times has to offer, and making sure we manage subscribers through important lifecycle moments in their journey as a subscriber. We have people who work on subscriber-only benefits to try to reinforce the value of a subscription and make clear to subscribers why what they’re paying for is worth more than the free product.

Then it’s subscriber-only content like the Year of Living Better guides that we’ve been doing. Then [we have] customer care — our whole customer service operations that answers the phones or responds to emails from subscribers who either have questions about our products or subscription offerings or who have complaints or concerns about anything we’re doing that they don’t like.

Again, just from my own experience, I get messaging all the time from The New York Times about subscriber benefits, exclusive content, events, chances to talk with reporters, stories I missed that I might enjoy, and so on. That’s the sort of work that has let the East Coast Times keep churn rates low and enabled the unending string of strong digital sub numbers they put out every quarter. Here’s Raju Narisetti, a veteran of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among others:

Behind-the-scenes, @nytimes subscriber churn rates appear down to low single digits. This is a very sustained change that is not easy to pull off but has paid off handsomely in subscriber retention and thus growth.

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) July 31, 2019

It requires a lot of departments working together beyond generating compelling journalism or beefing up the newsroom (both tablestakes now) as @latimes is now discovering.

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) July 31, 2019

One last excerpt from that Ben Cotton interview:

The other thing I’d add is that we’re experimenting all the time. A lot of these things we’re doing for the very first time…so we’re going to see how it works and we’re looking closely at the data we get from it. The cases where we see success we’ll probably do more like it, and the cases we don’t, we’ll move on and try other things…

I think that’s been the theme of this kind of work: that it’s been deeply collaborative and cross-functional, and that in many cases, they’re editorial-led ideas. Because we as a company have decided that we’re going to make subscriptions the focus of our business strategy, writers in the newsroom and editors and product managers and designers are always thinking about what we could be doing for our subscribers on a much more regular basis than they were before.

Here’s to more experimenting, more data evaluation, and more cross-functional collaboration. And most importantly, here’s to the L.A. Times — I hope they figure it out. We’ll all be better off if they do.

1. Some obligatory notes: The Washington Post reports digital subscription numbers as often as Amazon reports Kindle sales, which is to say only whenever it’s convenient for them — so that 1.7 million is my estimate. Other numbers are gathered from quarterly earnings reports and filings with the Alliance for Audited Media. Those AAM numbers are subject to lots of definitional hedging — counting how many digital subscribers you have is apparently a very hard thing to do! — but I tried to be as generous as possible in interpreting the numbers. It’s likely some may include double-counted subscribers.

API research fellow Tracy M. Cook looked at pricing of digital subscriptions to 100 newspapers across the U.S. in October 2017. The median price across the papers: $2.31 per week, or about $10 per month or $120 per year. (That’s actually down slightly from a 2016 API report that pegged the average weekly price of a digital newspaper subscription at $3.11 per week, across 77 papers. For this new data set, the average price was $2.44/week.

The median price excludes special introductory offers, as well as bundles like The Washington Post’s partnerships with Amazon and Hulu and The New York Times’ with Spotify. Cook also notes that digital newspaper pricing tends to fluctuate quite a bit, and it’s often unclear how long “short-term promotion” prices will hold.

According to this study, pricing wasn’t really dependent on market size or a paper’s circulation. What did seem to matter was the papers’ own “market testing,” as well as papers’ ownership. Some companies, like Tronc and McClatchy, standardized their pricing across all the papers they owned; for other companies, like Gannett, it varied.

In the case of Gannett, for instance, which owned 19 percent of the papers studied: “Most Gannett sites (14 out of the 19) charge an introductory rate of $0.99 for the first month of access before raising rates to $4.99 per month. Four sites charged a yearly fee of $29. One listed a $9.99 monthly rate with no introductory offer.”

Since the publishers say they’re relying on market testing rather than other factors, I wonder if the report suggests that readers have come to see an “appropriate digital subscription price” for most newspapers as about $10 a month — whether you’re talking about news or other kinds of content — and if a lot of publishers are just looking at other types of digital subscriptions and taking their lead. Spotify Premium is also $9.99/month, for instance; Hulu is $7.99/month, and Netflix’s standard package is $10.99 per month. Those services all offer access to a much wider variety of content than a single newspaper subscription does; in that context, the fact that people appear willing to pay $10 a month for one paper seems almost heartening.

“We are finding that about once every 18 months, there’s some new big strategy statement,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson told me this week after the announcement of a digital reorganization that included the promotion of CRO Meredith Kopit Levien to EVP and COO, and the elimination of Kinsey Wilson’s EVP of product and technology position.

“I think this is probably my third digital reorganization, and I haven’t been here five years yet,” Thompson said. “We are constantly course-correcting, adjusting as we make progress. A new opportunity and a new shape becomes possible, and we move to the new one. This won’t be the end of it: Everything is moving, our audience is moving, technology is moving, and we are working hard to make sure the organization is moving too.”

Levien is the Times’ first chief operating officer since Janet Robinson held that position in 2004. In her time as CRO, she focused on transforming the Times’ ad business with high-profile ventures like the T Brand Studio.

Then she drilled further into the Times’ already successful digital business. She and Clay Fisher, the Times’ SVP of consumer marketing and revenue, are credited inside the building with professionalizing what had been a “paywall experiment.” The Times led a movement that normalized reader subscriptions for digital news.

Now Levien’s challenge is to expedite the Times’ new product engine, finding more paying customers for products that already exist (Cooking, Watching) and are in the pipeline (potential health products).

In the shuffle, Kinsey Wilson, a pivotal figure in legacy-to-digital transformations at USA Today and NPR before the Times — leaves his full-time position as the Times’ editor for innovation and strategy and EVP, product and technology; that role is being eliminated. For now, he’ll stay on in a less-defined role.

Wilson bridged a digital culture and skills gap that was still apparent when he joined the company in early 2015. A year before, the Times’ own newsroom report had identified lots of problems in how the newsroom was approaching the digital age.

Today, the Times has a lot of confidence. It has more than three million print and digital subscribers and has been adding new digital subscriptions at the rate of almost 100,000 a month for six months.

Thompson is placing most of the business side in Levien’s hands, though he retains direct responsibility for “data” and “technology.” The COO title positions Levien, 46, as a potential successor to Thompson, 59.

I talked to Thompson and Levien about succession, about the key reasons for this restructuring, and about how the company looks at Thompson’s 10-million-subscriber march.

And it’s found remarkable success: Since launching in April 2014, the company has signed up about 130,000 digital subscribers — more than any American newspaper aside from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. That’s in Norway, a country with a population of about 5 million people. (By way of comparison, Gannett — which includes over 100 daily newspapers and operates in the much larger U.S. and U.K. — just announced it had crossed 250,000 paying digital-only subscribers last week.)

Amedia attributes the growth to a three-pronged strategy addressing three groups of customers: existing print subscribers, those who are registered online users, and those who are use the company’s sites without registering and logging in. In each case, the effort is to move people up the value chain: to get the unregistered to register, to convince the registered to subscribe, and to move print subscribers into digital registration and, eventually, to upsell them into premium products.

Amedia now has about 530,000 total paying users (both digital-only and print-plus-digital) registered in the aID system — about 10 percent of Norway’s entire population. And 800,000 Norwegians are registered on its sites.

Amedia expects the growth to plateau in 15 to 18 months, Pål Nedregotten, the company’s EVP in charge of business development, data/insight and innovation, told me last week at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. As the company prepares for growth to slow, it’s looking to find new ways to engage its existing audience more deeply. For instance, Amedia bought the rights to lower-level Norwegian soccer leagues and broadcast 347 matches last year.

Amedia made NOK 123 million ($14.3 million U.S.) in profit before taxes last year, a decrease from NOK 267 million ($31.2 million) in 2015. Advertising revenue fell by 16 percent in 2016, and for the first time last year, the company’s subscription revenue surpassed advertising.

Nedregotten gave a presentation about the company’s strategy at the conference. He and I spoke prior to his presentation about Amedia’s use of data, the importance of strong journalism, and what’s next for the company. Here’s a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.

The Globe plan focuses on publishing stories earlier in the day, restructuring beats, creating new audience engagement and express desks, and thinking of print as its own distinct platform, not the dominant driver of all workflows.

“None of the changes detailed here will come as any surprise, though in total, they represent significant change,” McGrory wrote:

The basic goals are familiar as well: to be more nimble, more innovative, and more inclined to take worthwhile risk; to get our best journalism in front of readers when and where they want to read it, throughout the day and across all our platforms; to be relentlessly interesting, jettisoning any sense of obligation in our report; to once and for all break the stubborn rhythms of a print operation, allowing us to unabashedly pursue digital subscriptions even while honoring the many loyal readers who subscribe to the physical paper.

Indeed, the changes are the latest indication that American metro newspapers are coalescing around a relatively unified vision for the future.

Over the past two years, newspapers such as The Dallas Morning News, the Miami Herald, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune have all enacted similar initiatives. (Poynter’s Kristen Hare has done a great job reporting from these newsrooms and covering the changes.)

The Star Tribune has a Quick Strike team to cover breaking news and report stories that play well on social media. The Herald staff is working to use analytics and data more effectively to understand its readership. The Morning News moved its morning news meeting from 10:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. Each of those will sound familiar to those reading the Globe’s plans.

The Minneapolis, Dallas, and Miami dailies have participated in the since-renamed Table Stakes project, a $1.3 million Knight Foundation-funded project that launched in 2015 and brought together the Morning News, Star Tribune, and Herald, along with the Philadelphia newspapers, to work together to reimagine their processes and share best practices.

In February, Knight and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism — the nonprofit that owns the Philadelphia dailies and was started by H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest — announced that they were renaming the project as the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and adding $4.8 million in funding over three years to increase the number of participating newsrooms. The Lenfest Institute is led by Jim Friedlich, the CEO of Empirical Media, a consulting firm that was acquired by the Institute and worked with many of the newsrooms that are involved.

The goal is to have 16 newsrooms participating in the project by 2019. The Seattle Times, San Jose Mercury News, Houston Chronicle, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel are set to join this year.

“The more we saw success in the areas where we just started doing something, the more confidence we gained that we could actually turn things around,” Star Tribune senior managing editor Suki Dardarian told Ken Doctor in February. “I think for so long in this industry, those of us in the newsroom have felt powerless to change anything. It was all about the decline in advertising, and we just had to stand by as witnesses. But in every newsroom I’ve been in, I think the journalists have always wanted to participate in helping the business succeed, and maybe they just didn’t know how, or we couldn’t connect folks from department to department. There is this well of desire in the newsroom to help the business succeed. Now we’re finally able to do things because the model is shifting towards the subscriber. That’s our sweet spot. So what can we do, using metrics, to understand our audience more and to engage them more?”

All of these reinvention efforts are rooted in a better understanding of audiences. Metro newspapers are becoming more reliant on direct reader revenue as print advertising disappears and digital advertising increasingly becomes the domain of Facebook and Google.

A reliance on reader revenue is, of course, the strategy The New York Times has very publicly declared as its path to success. But while the Times has about 1.5 million digital subscribers around the world, metro newspapers have a much smaller audience to draw upon. The Globe has more than 70,000 digital subscribers, the most of any metro newspaper.

The privately held Globe doesn’t report its financials. However, A.H. Belo, which owns the Morning News, is a public company, and reported $66.1 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016 — a 9.6 percent drop from the year before. But on a conference call with investors last month, CEO Jim Moroney said “first-quarter 2017 revenue trends compare favorably with the revenue trends we saw in the first nine months of 2016.”

So while the Globe is in a better position than most metro newsrooms, McGrory’s memo emphasized the need to craft coverage that is indispensable to its audience and ultimately convinces them that the journalism is worth paying for.

“We’re going to be more humorous, god dammit, and absolutely more humane,” McGrory wrote. “Boston is a big and fascinating place filled with savvy, often funny, and occasionally brilliant people. We need to reflect this even more, tap into it, and be part of it.”

Many do: The Journal recently hit 948,000 digital-only subscribers, according to owner News Corp, and it’s nudging its way toward the internal goal of 3 million subscribers across all of parent publisher Dow Jones’ properties by 2017.

But as a business-focused publication, the Journal has an affluent readership, and subscriptions are expensive, even with introductory offers or summer sales. With most of its stories under lock and key, casual readers have limited opportunity to try out Journal content, especially when paywall changes that catch the attention of these non-subscribing readers are tests to further tighten up access.

Now the Journal is trying to make its paywall neither stricter nor leakier, but bendier. It’s now testing 24-hour guest passes for non-subscribers, an offer that pops up when readers access a story shared by a subscriber or a Journal staffer. (If you don’t enter your email address, you just get to read the one story.) Down the line, the Journal may also be testing other time increments for the guest passes.

It’s also opening up opportunities for subscribers and members, as well as Journal staffers themselves, to share full articles for free through social media. If you click on any link shared by sportswriter Jason Gay, for instance, you’ll now definitely be able to read the story. These more significant paywall tweaks were first implemented last Friday, informed by experiments with distribution over the past several years, according to Dow Jones chief customer officer Katie Vanneck-Smith. (I asked about experiments like the closing of the Google search loophole, but she declined to go into specifics about previous tests but said in general tests have helped grow the Journal’s paying subscriber base.)

“We’ve been successful at having a digital paywall, but we haven’t innovated it in a number of years,” Vanneck-Smith said. “Now we’re making sure that instead of a one-size-fits-all approach for customer groups, we have a more sophisticated approach that’s dependent on customers and the stories they’re previously reading.”

@ExCBOHealth @AmyAHarder Judy, our paywall restrictions changed today & not everyone knows how it works. Sorry you were so quick to leave.

— Elizabeth Bernstein (@EBernsteinWSJ) August 8, 2016

“Everything our journalists and members share through social channels will act as an invitation and is the beginning of a personalized journey for the guest member,” Vanneck-Smith said. Depending on the reading profile of each referred guest, the recommendations and offers will vary — if I’m always coming to the Journal for earnings reports, for instance, I might start getting directed to specific relevant newsletters. “In some instances, we won’t know anything. This may be our first contact. Where we have a profile of a customer coming in, be that through first- or third-party data, if they have read on the site before, we will know the stories that appeal to them, and we will make sure they’re aware of all the great things they’re missing out on by not being a member of the Journal.”

Such personalization and recommendation tactics might be Marketing 101, Vanneck-Smith said, but paywalls of so many media outlets are relatively “blunt tools,” whether hard or metered. With its new change, the Journal is taking the line that the best way to add long-term subscribers is through referrals from other Journal readers and Journal reporters. (Not every paid news site is using a blunt instrument, of course. Tech site The Information allows subscribers to share a story with non-subscribers — provided they enter an email address. The Financial Times has seen success with paid trial subscriptions.) The Journal’s now expanded social sharing doesn’t mean it’s deferring to social media, Vanneck-Smith said, emphasizing that the company’s overall distributed content strategy has still been a very cautious one.

“The destination has become a very hard place to protect,” she said. “The big players — the Facebooks, the Googles — have in many ways become the default for many customers. As publishers, our job is to strike a balance between understanding how we protect the destination that is our brand, and also work with the consumer behavior of using distributed platforms as a gateway into news and information, and into the wider web.”

While other major publishers have flocked to Facebook’s Instant Articles and its heavily promoted livestreaming feature, News Corp has made no deals so far with Facebook to use Facebook Live. It deliberately publishes only its technology stories to Instant Articles, having found that to be a good “warmup” to paid subscriptions. And while the Journal has a seemingly out-of-place channel in Snapchat Discover, Vanneck-Smith reiterated that the Snapchat partnership was a “longterm play,” and that it, too can’t be ruled out as an eventual avenue to subscriptions.

“We’re still a destination. The Journal will always be a destination,” she said.

“The calling card of the organization is that it provided all this great news for insiders. But it’s also just great news. We’re the ones at the planning commission at three in the morning, we’re the ones watching the city website for memos that are coming out on everything, you name it,” Kanin said. “We can get pretty wonky. But we want to continue to do as much of that as possible.”

The nonprofit Monitor offers three tiers of paid subscription (anyone can read five posts each month for free, or purchase some articles individually). All-access — which comes with unlimited access to all of the Monitor’s coverage, all of the archives, premium content, and annotated tipsheets of council agendas — isn’t cheap, at $97.43 per month for an individual subscription. (Bulk subscriptions for companies are $4,000.) The “civic enthusiast” tier opens access to all stories up to 90 days old (no archives) at $21.65 per month, for people who still want to follow along with city business relatively closely. The “keep me informed” tier allows 10 stories a month at $5.41.

As of this month, the Monitor has 1,264 paid subscribers (143 Civic Enthusiasts, 136 Keep Me Informed readers). It offers a range of deep discounts to all-access subscriptions, including for nonprofits and volunteers on the city of Austin’s boards and commissions. Through a Monitor in the Classroom program, a partnership with Google Fiber, students in that program access its stories for free as well.

“The goal has been to drive the bar down to make it so that more regular folks can afford to read us,” Kanin said. “As Austin has grown, there are so many questions about how we got here, how we’re going to stay here, whether we should’ve gotten here in the first place. Our nose-to-the-ground reporting, that might otherwise be missed by a daily, is super important as we try to understand the position that our city finds itself in.”

The Monitor has been formally known as the Monitor since December 2013, though the site evolved from another publication that has covered the city since 1995, starting out as a print newsletter for local politics. Longtime reporter Jo Clifton bought the publication and took it online around 2000, implementing an “extremely high paywall” for “extremely high access,” almost unheard of at the time. In 2010, Clifton sold what was then known as In Fact Daily to the Austin American-Statesman, the Cox Media-owned local daily. Kanin was a contract writer for IFD at the time. It became clear, he said, the Statesman wasn’t sure what to do with IFD. Eventually (“And I think all of these moments start with, ‘I was drinking with a friend…'”), Kanin, through the vehicle of the Capital of Texas Media Foundation, a nonprofit he’d founded with some friends, purchased IFD from the Statesman. The deal went through in October 2013. A fully revamped site under the new Austin Monitor name went live August 2014. Clifton still contributes regularly, but on her own time.

“We started out being really locally focused, and maybe not even caring much about attracting more readers. We were sort of stubbornly covering all of the stuff nobody else covered,” Pagano, who was a reporter at the publication when it was still In Fact Daily, said. (Pagano also wrote for the Austin Chronicle.) “We still do that to some extent, but over the past year or two, we’ve loosened up and started covering some bigger issues, while still staying hyperlocally focused on city hall. We try to be a little more inviting than we used to be, with still the same depth.”

Pagano manages around five to seven freelance contributing reporters at the moment. City hall coverage is indeed its bread and butter, but some additional coverage can be driven by reporters’ interests as well: “There are always a few basic areas our reporters cover. But if a reporter was very into, say, environmental issues, I’ll let them write about that,” she said.

Growing the Monitor’s audience is a new(ish) concern. Subscriptions generate a good amount of revenue, but far from enough to let it operate at the scale Kanin and Pagano envision. The site sees about 2,000 unique visitors a day; 5,000 or so with hotter issues (like the ride-sharing controversy). Both Kanin and Pagano would like to see the site get into features and analysis on a more regular basis.

“We can’t right now survive on only subscriptions. If the foundation and donor money dried up, we’d have to shrink back a little. We don’t want to do that. I think three years into it, we’re hitting our stride in a lot of ways,” Kanin said. “But the subscription model allows us to putt-putt along as we experiment with other things and figure out what coverage is going to work for everybody. We can do a lot more work in terms of sponsorships, and we’re getting there. I hear from some folks that foundation money for journalism is drying up, so maybe our timing isn’t the best, but even so, we can do a lot more there — just because we haven’t done much at all yet.” One recent grant: a Knight-funded INNovation award to build map showing exact locations of where its stories are taking place.

The Monitor is hosting an interactive budget game night in August — remember, wonky — to get attendees to create their own budget proposals and submit them to a panel of judges. With Open Austin, a volunteer code/civic hacking group, it’s also building an interactive platform to let people play around with the budget themselves. It’s started a joint venture on events with local nonprofit Glasshouse Policy, and will put on a series of events in the fall, culminating in a “City Summit” event in December (moving to Google Fiber’s offices this year, from University of Texas).

“We’re not The Texas Tribune, obviously. We don’t have a dedicated events staff. But I hope the partnership will let us make this into a much bigger event, and moving to Google Fiber will help raise the profile a little bit,” Kanin said. “We’re hoping the partnership can be a sort of individual events farm that provides community with a great service in terms of making the stuff that we cover and Glasshouse works on, a bit more accessible to the greater community, but also in the process generate a little bit of revenue.”

Have an ideas of where the City's money should go? @OpenPolicyTx & @austinmonitor are hosting a Budget Game Night: https://t.co/6dlxwxdyIa

— CAN (@CAN_Austin) July 27, 2016

Content partnerships have helped it increase its reach. For a while, it was sharing some stories with The Texas Tribune, but the hyperlocal wonkiness of the Monitor didn’t end up being a fit for the state-focused Tribune. The Monitor has a tight partnership with local NPR affiliate KUT and shares some reporting resources, and it has teamed up with local PBS affiliate KLRU and KUT on a multi-platform series called Austin’s Eastern Frontier, which won a regional Murrow award.

“We hope this kind of stuff will get the semi-interested person, if not into wonk territory, to at least oh, this is going on in my city territory,” Kanin said. “From there, we think it’s a smaller leap to I want to get a bit more involved.”

BI Intelligence, the company’s paid subscription research service, is aiming big as well. It has over 5,000 paying subscribers across its suite of offerings, it says, with around 30 dedicated staffers. It’s expanding its team, including hiring for a director of research to manage its portfolio for what it’s describing as an “international research company.” Intelligence’s staff and its number of corporate clients have each doubled in the last year, according to BI’s spokesperson. He declined to share more specific numbers but said the company’s research arm saw a 200 percent increase in revenue over the past year.

“I’m closing in on a year here, but even before I joined Henry [Blodget] and Julie [Hansen] sensed a real business opportunity with Business Insider Intelligence,” said Andrew Sollinger, executive vice president of subscriptions at Business Insider who runs BI Intelligence. “The concept is to supplement all the great work with a focused premium subscription, keyed in on various areas of digital disruption, and certainly how tech is slamming into every industry and turning them upside down.”

Sollinger joined Business Insider last year from Capital New York (pre-Politico rebrand), and is tasked also with implementing new paid content strategies at BI, which includes some form of a subscription component for the currently free site; Politico reports that’s coming sometime this year. The BI newsroom and the Intelligence arm are separate, and Intelligence revenue goes “back into the whole company.” “We’re like a little startup within a startup,” Sollinger said.

At the beginning of 2014, Henry Blodget, CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, also told AdWeek that money made through BI Intelligence was not “propping up” the free Business Insider news site, and that it was simply a very good “second income stream.” BI Intelligence had just six employees then, and the division was hiring a reporting team to expand from research and reports to industry news coverage.

Intelligence now produces reports in six areas — mobile, digital media, payments, e-commerce, the Internet of Things, and most recently, fintech (financial technology; think Apple Pay, Venmo, Square) — along with daily Intelligence newsletter briefings, daily charts, and daily paid Insider newsletters tied to the news cycle. (Full disclosure: I’m set up to receive the daily Digital Media Insider newsletter, which includes links and analysis across the industry, for free. It’s listed at $295 a year, though you can sign up for $195 a year.)

Intelligence conducts its own primary research (this survey of millennials’ banking habits, for instance) and synthesizes data from other sources. Paying clients can submit questions and feedback (there was a free webinar with a BI Intelligence analyst to kick off the fintech vertical’s launch) though the team tries to keep the subscription services “as unbiased as possible so that one particular subscriber isn’t guiding the research.” Business Insider will often tease Intelligence reports on its news site, directing readers to subscribe.

Individual research reports are pricy — $395 or $495 per report — and an all-access subscription, which gets you Insider newsletters, access to reports, and more, costs $2,495 a year. (There other pricing options for groups: Harvard, where our little newsroom is situated, for instance, has licensed Intelligence for undergraduates, its business school, and faculty, a spokesperson told me.) Which, if you’re used to thinking in terms of newspaper subscriptions is way more than, say, a yearly Wall Street Journal subscription, but also way less than products from eMarketer or Forrester. (Gigaom’s then research service launched with a much lower price point. That didn’t quite work out.)

John Heggestuen, a managing analyst for BI Intelligence, is overseeing its newest fintech vertical from London. Heggestuen and his team in London are the company’s first international analysts.

“We have a different lens on this because we are looking at this from the U.K.,” Heggestuen said. (The U.K. has been pushing for a fintech friendly environment. Heggestuen also cited a PwC global survey in which 83 percent of respondents from the traditional financial industry feel they are at risk of losing some parts of their business to standalone fintech companies.) “That impacts how we interpret that research we do, but the fintech vertical is ultimately a global product.”

Heggestuen, who helped launch BI Intelligence’s payments vertical in 2013, said that Intelligence subscribers began requesting the team expand on the research they were doing in that arena: “It’s a natural extension of what we’ve done with payments, especially since our focus with BI Intelligence is how new technologies are disrupting these different industries.”

After the launch of Business Insider Germany, Julie Hansen, Business Insider’s COO and president, told me that the team frequently received requests for more research covering European and Asian data, and that the subscription research service could certainly expand abroad. Has Axel Springer’s acquisition of Business Insider changed at all the way the subscription research arm operates?

“Axel Springer is very keen on Intelligence. They’re letting us do our thing, the way they’ve been with editorial. We’re completely independent, other than them being completely encouraging of our work,” Sollinger said. “We’ve met with them and we’ve talked about how we can grow the research arm internationally — which is, interestingly, nearly half our audience. And I think that’s because folks operating in international markets are looking to the U.S., which is a digital leader, for trends they can take back to their own marketplaces.”

In Canada, though, the Winnipeg Free Press is trying a different tactic: Last year, it became the first North American paper to introduce a micropayment plan that lets users pay by the article.

Now, about eight months after fully launching the system, about 4,300 readers have bought at least one individual story. On average, readers who pay by the article are spending about $2 per month, Christian Panson, the Free Press’ vice president for digital content and audience revenue told me. In all, the paper expects to earn about $100,000 in digital revenue in 2016.

Each individual story costs 27 cents (currently $0.21 U.S. — weak Canadian dollar these days), and addition to micropayments, the Free Press also offers monthly digital subscriptions that cost $16.99 ($13.28 U.S.) a month and give users unlimited access to its website and apps. About 4,000 people have become digital subscribers, Panson said; the paper says it expects to have 4,400 by year’s end. In addition, about 25,000 print subscribers have activated a digital account.

The Free Press projects that it’ll make an additional $500,000 ($390,786 U.S.) from all its digital payment offerings in 2016, according to its parent company’s Q4 earnings report, which was released in March, with about a fifth of that total coming from micropayments.

“You might say: That’s not life changing, right? And I don’t think it is. The key there though is setting the groundwork for the future,” Panson said. “If you were to take the 29,000 people that we have who are activated and shift them all to digital — we have no intention of stopping print tomorrow, but say we did —how many of those 29,000 people would continue to pays us? Based on what we’re seeing and the activity level, we feel it would be a very high amount. So you [multiply] that by $16.99 and suddenly the numbers start to look a little more interesting.”

The Free Press’ parent company, FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership, has a lot of catching up to do in terms of digital revenue. In 2015, print advertising accounted for 61 percent of the company’s total revenue; total digital revenue made up just 4 percent of the total, or $3.64 million ($2.85 million U.S.), well below even the low standards of American newspaper companies.

FPLP generated $89 million ($69.58 million U.S.) in total revenue in 2015, $10 million ($7.8 million U.S.) less than it made in 2014. Last year, the company said it expected its 2015 digital revenue to grow by 10 to 15 percent, but FP Newspapers reported that its overall digital revenue actually fell by $200,000 ($156,379 U.S.), or 5.3 percent. It said a decrease in online classified ads and reduced advertising in its mobile apps accounted for the drop. “Our 2016 plan is to grow this revenue source back to the 2014 level or beyond by continually improving our digital product offerings and making small investments to promote both our desktop website and our mobile apps,” the company said.

The Free Press anticipated that the paywall would result in a drop in traffic, and Panson said visits are currently down about 20 percent year over year. That’s an improvement from earlier months when traffic had dropped by more than 30 percent. Even before it put its new payment system in place, the Free Press was selling less than half of its available web ad inventory, so the change hasn’t impacted its online advertising, Panson said.

Still, the company saw a 14 percent drop in print advertising revenue last year. “FPLP’s print advertising revenues are expected to continue to face challenges in 2016 as a result of continued shifts in spending by advertisers,” the company said in its latest report. “Print advertising revenues for the first two months of 2016 were approximately 10.0% lower than the previous year.”

Some have long seen micropayments — an “iTunes for news” — as a potential route to digital revenue. Last month, the Dutch platform Blendle launched in the United States with 20 publications — including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist — posting stories that can be purchased individually to its site and apps.

While most of the stories those outlets publish are available on Blendle, cofounder Alexander Klöpping told me last month that the platform isn’t really meant for breaking news or day-to-day stories.

wait oops I just bought some NYT letters to the editor on @BlendleDE for 19 cents pic.twitter.com/RtxEE4w0nF

— Shan Wang (@shansquared) April 1, 2016

“We know that just plain news stories — something that Donald Trump has said — doesn’t sell well on Blendle,” he said. “Our users have an inclination toward the more longform, the more analytic, the more background pieces.”

It’s those more heavily reported features or investigative stories that do well for the Free Press as well, Panson said, but the paper only publishes one or two of those stories each week. Like any newspaper, most of what the Free Press covers are the more incremental stories about local crime, Manitoba politics, or last night’s Jets game.

The Free Press is still seeing growth on the digital front though even as it hasn’t quite met its expectations. Panson said the paper anticipated having 10,000 users sign up for the micropayment option and that those users would on average spend $1 per month. Though the paper has fewer of those users, they’re spending more than the paper expected.

On average, the paper is adding about 40 or so micropayment subscribers each week. (Though Panson said that number has softened in recent weeks. One hypothesis: Snowbirds are returning to Winnipeg and converting their digital subscriptions into full print subscriptions.)

The Free Press has converted about 500 micropayment users into full digital subscribers by targeting users who are spending more than $9 per month buying individual stories, Panson said.

“We’re still in our ballpark range of projected revenue from it, but we’re seeing this really effective funnel that we can take the highest value people in there and move them up the ladder,” Panson said.

Converting users from buying single articles to monthly subscribers is key to the paper’s future growth. Panson said the paper knows that it will be a slow, tough climb as it figures out whether its tapped out the market for paying news consumers in Winnipeg.

“That’s really one of the lessons we’ve learned: Whatever you do, don’t expect instant results,” he said. “I still don’t think we’ve determined whether or not we’re to a point where new acquisitions are organic at this point or pent up demand from shutting the site down. Certainly I wouldn’t expect that after a year we will still have pent up demand, but maybe there will be. I don’t know.”

The Free Press introduced its digital subscription plan last February, and it encouraged readers to register with the site. It turned on the system in May and gave registered users a free 30-day trial before it began charging them. (It staggered the start of the trials to prevent its system from overloading.) The paper keeps track of how many stories each reader buys, then payments are made monthly.

New signups still get a free 30-day trial, but the Free Press also lets readers access two stories for free, so when it scores a viral hit those readers weren’t required to register or pay for the story. This happened in January when the Free Press received more than 1 million pageviews — its most popular story ever — on a report about a local woman who got ill while on vacation in Cuba and was evacuated to Florida, where she ultimately died.

“It sold a lot, but it doesn’t generate a huge amount when they’re one-and-dones,” Panson said.

Though the Free Press has no imminent plans to tweak its model, Panson said the paper is looking into a few ideas as it tries to attract digital subscribers, especially as it has access to more data about the types of stories that are successful. It’s considering charging more for bigger stories or holding “happy hours” where stories would be cheaper for a set period of time if it wanted to generate more traffic. The paper also has email addresses for 180,000 registered users that it could use to target potential subscribers.

The Free Press, Panson said, is going to continue to market its paid digital offerings as it tries to convince readers in Winnipeg and throughout Manitoba that journalism is worth paying for.

“We are a for-profit business. There’s an ownership group that believes in journalism. That’s why they allowed us to do this kind of stuff, but we still need to fund it,” Panson said. “The ownership group isn’t about philanthropy, even though they believe in the journalistic effort we do here and the integrity it needs to have. At a certain point, we need to find new ways of making money because the old ways will not pay for us to do the kind of work we do anymore.”

The report looked all U.S. newspapers with a circulation over 50,000.

Metered paywalls are the most common; the median number of free articles at papers with a metered paywall is 10. Meanwhile, freemium models — in which the traditional newspaper’s website is free, with basic content like wire stories and weather, but proprietary content is hosted on a separate paid site — “are 3 times more popular in the Southwest [36 percent of newspapers] than in any other region.”

Just three papers — The Wall Street Journal, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and Newsday — have hard paywalls.

Digital subscription rates vary widely by the paper’s location (“newspapers in the Northeast and Central United States tend to have higher digital subscription prices”), subscribers’ locations (subscribers outside a certain geographic area pay more), and type of paywall:

According to our data, newspapers charged an average of $3.11 a week for a digital-only subscription and $3.29 for a digital subscription + Sunday print delivery. At the extreme ends of the pricing spectrum, the most expensive plans belong to the Omaha World Herald ($6.25 digital & $8.74 to include Sunday print) while the least expensive plans belong to the Daily Gazette in Schenectady, N.Y. ($1.25 digital & $1.50 to include Sunday print).

Our data shows that the type of model may influence the cost of a digital subscription. The average weekly price of a digital subscription for newspapers using a meter model is $2.97. For freemium models, the price increases to $3.52. And for newspapers using a hard model, the average price jumps to $4.43.

The report also looks at how pricing strategies have changed over time — especially since 2012, “a pivotal year for digital subscription plans.” The New York Times launched its metered paywall in 2011. “By the end of 2012, 41 of the 98 newspapers studied had launched metered subscription models, 7 more ‘hard’ models, and 4 freemium models.”

The Times’ strategy has been particularly successful, Williams argues, because the Times “spent a year to study and test how to market the digital subscription.” Other papers then followed that model, rather than doing their own research: One study, for instance, found that “85 percent of publishers consulted with other newspapers before implementing a plan. However, only 29 percent conducted focus groups and only 28 percent tested the digital subscription with a subset of users.”

The full report is here.

The Times reported on the event, of course: “The electronic newspaper (address: http:/www.nytimes.com) is part of a strategy to extend the readership of The Times and to create opportunities for the company in the electronic media industry.” The story ran on Page D7.

Happy 20th birthday to https://t.co/sYpRHsjbKc which went live on this day in 1996. https://t.co/yU78iM8u6r pic.twitter.com/GFGFGbUdsI

— NYT Archives (@NYTArchives) January 22, 2016

(The eagle-eyed will notice that the online version of the story gets the address slightly wrong, with only one slash after the “http:” rather than two. Today’s web browsers can deal with the omission; those of 1996 couldn’t. The print version — which is where people would have been reading it, naturally — got it right.)

The Times’ had begun publishing on AOL in 1994. In 1995, the Times created The New York Times Electronic Media Company to develop the paper’s digital presence, and that fall it launched the first beta of the Times’ website.

Martin Nisenholtz was president of the Times Electronic Media Company and joined the company in 1995 to launch the website. In a 2013 interview for the Riptide project, Nisenholtz — who came to the Times from an advertising and interactive media background — explained how the paper approached the new website (see this video starting around 9:30 in):

My thinking was, The New York Times should maybe approach the web, in some ways, the way Yahoo did. Yahoo was a kind of directory, and I thought, “Well, jeez, the Times could do, in essence, what Yahoo was doing. It could find the best stuff for people.” The journalism of The Times, probably, was not — at that point, in any event — very interesting on a PC. It was just very, very clunky. But I realized very quickly that was just not going to happen.

What The Times wanted, for good reason in some ways, was to publish the journalism of The New York Times on the web. In fact, that’s what I think, probably, 99 percent of the people who would use The New York Times on the web would expect from it.

Now, of all the things, of all the decisions that have been made, I think that one is the most seminal. The idea to publish what was, in essence, the newspaper instead of going in a different direction at the outset.

I think that, certainly, publishing the newspaper on the web is what was expected. It’s what the consumer expected. It’s what was logical. It was low risk, in many respects. It didn’t cost very much because we already had the content. It made a world of sense.

But, in some ways, some fundamental ways, it kept the Times from truly being a great innovator, because it didn’t allow for something startlingly new. [laughs]

At launch, the Times’ website was free for users in the United States, but the paper decided to charge readers who accessed the site from abroad. For $1.95 a pop, users could also download stories to their computers and the site also offered “a customized clipping service” that let users set up email alerts by topic.

From a business perspective, Nisenholtz said, the Times’ focus was squarely on online advertising, so the paper wanted to build as large an audience as it could on its website, and after about 18 months it decided to stop charging readers outside of the United States for access to the site.

We got, I want to say, about 3,600 subscribers. One of the things I like to say is we ended the experiment on Bastille Day, and that day, I believe it was in 1998, we got more registered users in about an hour than we had subscribers in the last 18 months.

The fact is that, at that time, in a general news context, given the quality of the product that we were building in a narrowband context, very crude technology, we absolutely, I think, made the right decision to build the audience because, as I think we’ll get to later, we’ll see that a lot of the economics of going pay have to do with conversion rates off of your loyal base, the people who are coming to you every day.

Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, speaking at a 1995 Nieman Foundation conference on public interest journalism in the “On-Line Era” called the paper’s digital efforts an “experiment.”

“We don’t know where this is going. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself,” Sulzberger said. “We do know that. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. And there’s not a lot of ways to make money.”

Sulzberger went on to say that he expected it would take some time for the Times to figure out how to make money online, but ultimately he thought it would be feasible:

I don’t need to make money this year, and I don’t need to make money next year. And I’d like to lose a little less money the year after that…But at some point, and some point not very far down the line, we’re going to have to start seeing a financial return. And I don’t think that’s going to be as difficult as we think it is today, because I think the ethos and ethics of the web are changing.

I guess I’m betting on that, aren’t I? Am I wrong?

He wasn’t wrong, but it took the Times a while to get there.

The Times’ initial assumption was that it would be able to support its web operations by selling display and classified ads on its website. An onslaught of competition from online companies hampered the Times’ (and other newspapers’) advertising business both in print and online, upending the news industry’s business model.

Though the Times quickly abandoned its first attempt to charge for its journalism online — and had only middling success with its mid-2000s effort TimesSelect, killing it after two years — it eventually came back to the strategy for good in 2011 when it launched its metered paywall. Print advertising revenue is still critical, making up 73 percent of the Times’ total ad revenue in the third quarter last year, but the paper is looking increasingly to digital subscriptions for revenue growth.

Last year, the Times said it had signed up 1 million paying digital subscribers, and in October it said it aimed to double its digital revenue to $800 million by 2020. One of the keys to that initiative will be digital subscriptions; just today Mashable reported that the Times is experimenting with cheaper subscriptions for iPhone users. It’s also trying to reach new audiences by optimizing its reporting for different mediums, especially on mobile, while also offering higher quality advertising products. In addition, the Times is attempting to reach more subscribers internationally by adding foreign-language editions.

Though the Times’ digital output has obviously grown immensely since 1996, it’s still experimenting with how it will continue to report and tell stories online — and it can all be traced back to that day 20 years ago when the Times debuted on the World Wide Web.

“At the time, nobody really could know ultimately how important this was,” Nisenholtz said in an interview in December with the Times’ corporate site. “We all had a sense that something important was happening, but at the time there were actually very few users. So it was a bet on people getting online and buying more PCs.”

In order to meet the ambitious goal, which was outlined in a lengthy memo signed by New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, executive editor Dean Baquet, and other executives, the Times plans to redouble its focus on reader engagement and subscriptions. The Times introduced its paywall in 2011, and in July it said that it had reached 1 million digital subscribers — a feat that the paper has been celebrating all week with laudatory stories.

The Times must focus on reaching readers on various social platforms and mobile devices while also converting them into paying subscribers, the memo said. The release of this memo follows the leak of last year’s Innovation Report, which made striking recommendations for how the paper could improve its digital reach and audience engagement.

“Our first two million subscribers — including our more than one million newspaper subscribers — grew up with The New York Times spread out over their kitchen tables,” the Times executives said in the memo. “The next million must be fought for and won over with The Times on their phones.”

Here is a full version of the memo, and here are four of our takeaways.

Simplify subscriptions to reach younger users

Younger readers are key to the Times’ continued growth, and moving forward the paper will be ever more focused on attracting younger subscribers. According to the memo, 40 percent of the Times’ mobile audience is under 35. And 12 percent of the Times’ audience now accounts for 90 percent of its subscription revenue, according to Ravi Somaiya’s report on the memo in the Times.

There is clearly a large audience there, but the challenge is converting them to paying subscribers.

The Times’ first attempt at a lower-priced mobile product, NYT Now, failed to attract a substantial paying audience, and last year the Times made the app free and advertising-supported. Now the Times is looking at other ways it can streamline its paid offerings. For example, since 2011, readers have been asked to pick between several device-centric subscription packages: web plus smartphone, web plus tablet, and web plus smartphone plus tablet.

“As our subscription model approaches its fifth anniversary, we know it must be updated with simplified pricing options that reflect our readers’ multiplatform lives,” the memo says. “We are actively testing to find the right price and approach. Even though it may come with short‐term costs, we believe making our subscription offerings more intuitive will increase subscriber growth and retention, and ultimately revenue, in the long term.”

The Times also says it needs to make it easier to subscribe. It’ll begin offering free subscription trials and offer more perks to current subscribers.

Improve advertising and sponsorships

Though the Times acknowledged that digital subscribers are key to its future, advertising remains another significant part of its business model. And with the entire industry fretting of late over the rise of ad blockers, the Times said it needs to improve the quality of its ads while also offering new and different advertising and sponsorship opportunities.

The memo highlighted the Times’ work with Google to pair Google Maps with its 36 Hours travel series along with a “remarkable virtual-reality package” that’s forthcoming as ways that “add value to user experiences without confusing readers or compromising the independence of our journalism.” Last month, the Times created a new job for Trish Hall, formerly the deputy editorial page editor, to work with both the editorial and business sides of the paper to identify editorial projects that might be ripe for special sponsorships.

The Times also last month released a new mobile ad format, called Mobile Moments, that surfaces ads that are more suited for mobile consumption and that are customized to the time in the day that they’re being accessed. While the memo lauds this effort, it said the paper must continue to work to improve its mobile and video advertising offerings.

Optimize for different mediums

Over the past year, the Times has made a serious effort to focus less of its attention on print as its primary medium. Earlier this year, the Times changed the structure of its daily news meeting to de-emphasize discussion of what would be on A1 of the next day’s newspaper and instead focus on how the Times is continually covering stories across all its platforms. And just yesterday, Baquet said the Times was creating a centralized editorial team to focus exclusively on print production.

“We are moving most print production responsibilities away from individual desks and placing them in the hands of a centralized group of editors,” Baquet wrote in a memo. “This new centralized print group will be part of a news hub — an expansion of the current news desk — that oversees the placement and presentation of coverage on all platforms.”

In the memo released today, the Times emphasized that it was prioritizing the reader experience on all types of platforms and devices, from smartwatches to email newsletters, as it emphasizes the reality that revenue generated from readers is critical to the organization’s longevity, and, as a result, the Times will need to focus its energy to making the reader experience something worth paying for.

“We are trying new features and making improvements monthly — from mobile alerts connected to readers’ interests to articles that rewrite and contextualize data based on your hometown — and we are assembling teams to take on the more ambitious work of designing fully personalized, responsive experiences, starting with mobile,” the memo said.

Last year, the Times released its NYT Cooking site and app, which is a compendium of all the recipes from the Times’ food coverage. (The app is free, but some have speculated that the Times will make it a paid product.) NYT Cooking now has about 5 million monthly users, according to the memo, and the Times plans to expand the approach to real estate, health, and film and television.

“Together these efforts aim to reimagine our features sections for the mobile era with the same vigor and creativity that we put into launching them in the 1970s,” the memo said.

The memo also said the Times will extend its work to changing the structure and practice of the organization to reach these goals. This month, for the first time ever, all reporters will have access to a suite of analytics tools to see how readers are consuming and engaging with their stories.

It also emphasized increased cross-department collaboration to build new products that will attract and retain users.

“Over the next few years, the battle is going to be won or lost on smartphones,” the memo said. “This continues to be our biggest area of focus in every part of the organization. But longer term, we have to build a flexible organization that can respond quickly to future changes in technology and user behavior.”

Extend international reach

The Times said it already has paying subscribers in 193 countries, but it’s also looking to reach new audiences outside the United States in order to grow its paying subscriber base.

This year, the Times began translating a handful of stories each day into Spanish for a new América section on its website and corresponding social media accounts. The paper also often translates one-off features or columns into other languages when they relevant. In September, the Times also began targeting readers in Asia through the popular messaging app WeChat with posts in English and Chinese.

In today’s memo, The Times said it’ll continue “to tailor our journalism and products to make them more relevant for specific new audiences, rather than viewing the rest of the world as just one big audience.”

International editor Joseph Kahn and Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, the Times’ international president, are working together “to ensure we are aggressively executing a unified approach to international content, audience development, and monetization efforts across the company,” the memo said.

While the Times said distributed platforms such as Snapchat and Facebook’s Instant articles are key ways to expose global to the Times’ journalism, its emphasis will still be to bring readers back to the Times’ own websites and apps even as it undertakes additional experimentation in those areas.

“But our clear focus remains on driving interested readers back to our platforms where we can expose them to the full breadth of our work and help them build a lifetime relationship with The New York Times.”

While Amazon has never released the number of its Prime memberships, the latest estimates range from 25 to 40 million. That’s a powerful installed base of customers to expose to the Post offer. The initiative, long in the works, bolsters the Post as a revivified national and global news source, one more competitive to the New York Times, among others. In addition, it opens a new skirmish in the platform wars of 2015, as major platform Amazon puts the Jeff Bezos-owned Post front and center while Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News and Snapchat Discover re-work the mobile presentation of news…

Since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Post two years ago, we’ve speculated on how and when he would hook up the power of Amazon to the Post. The most logical connection: Amazon Prime. What began as a $79-a-year, guaranteed-two-day delivery program has grown into one of the country’s biggest membership plays. The Post will be the sixth major benefit offered Prime memberships, after “free” shipping, movies and TV, music, photo storage and a Kindle lending library. Prime membership now costs $99 per year…

In the Prime foray, we see the wider Bezos strategy now playing out more clearly. Unsurprisingly, it is a profoundly Amazonian strategy: Build the customer base for years; reap the profits later. It is, we should note, also the driving philosophy of the Big Three of the digital news world, Vice, Buzzfeed and Vox Media.

“Growth is the fundamental goal,” Steve Hills recently told me. Hills is the Post’s president, who just last week announced his end-of-the-year departure after 28 years at the paper.

Read Ken’s piece for a lot more detail, but a few quick reactions:

— Post access for Prime members is cheap, but not free. Ken argues that won’t be much of a problem:

The new offer will be an easy one for Prime members to accept. Those signing up will get the Post’s National Digital Edition — its national and global coverage — free for six months. Then, they’ll be charged $3.99 per month — indefinitely. That’s a $48-a-year price point, and one that could shake up wider digital news pricing.

That is cheap. (Though not quite as cheap as the 19-bucks-a-year offer the Post was making this summer.) But the difference between free and cheap is a big one. Or, to frame it more accurately, the difference between “being a Prime member for $99 a year” and “being a Prime member for $99 a year and paying another $48 a year for The Washington Post” is not insubstantial. A lot of this will come down to pricing psychology: How well can Amazon convince people to let the price tag fade into their mental backgrounds?

(Note that the Post’s press release about the deal says simply: “Amazon Prime Members Enjoy Digital Access to The Washington Post for Free.” Not “Free For A Few Months Until We Start Charging.” You can get a free trial of Amazon Prime too, but I doubt Amazon would headline a press release “Amazon Customers Now Enjoy Access to Amazon Prime for Free.” Also: That press release also doesn’t mention the name Jeff Bezos anywhere, which is odd.)

Amazon also tells Doctor that “this is a limited time offer,” though it’s unclear what that means — it’s hard to imagine them stepping away from a free-trial model anytime soon.

Perhaps the most interesting issue here, from Amazon’s perspective, is why limit this subscription deal to Prime members? I doubt many people will sign up for Prime just to get a better deal on the Post. It’s possible it’ll help with Prime member retention, though I suspect that benefit will be small. But what about the many millions of non-Prime Amazon customers — should they get a deal too? Will they?

— Prepare not to know how well this works. Amazon doesn’t release any hard data around Prime or its Kindle business, and I fully expect the Post to do the same. Bezos has made it clear he sees no need to share that sort of business information publicly or with outside audit groups.

— The New York Times should be a little more nervous today. The Washington Post, back in the Graham days, famously decided not to commit to national distribution as the Times had. As Sarah Ellison put it in Vanity Fair three years ago:

From the moment he became publisher, in 1979, [Donald Graham] insisted that the newspaper must concentrate on its Washington readers. But not everyone got the message. Inside the Post, there was always a powerful tension between Graham’s view and the view of the newsroom, which, starting with [Ben] Bradlee and for a period of decades, sought to compete on a national stage with The New York Times — and to a significant degree succeeded.

And indeed, the Post made outsized profits in the those final pre-Internet days by building a deeply local product in a city that also happened to be the capital of the world’s superpower. But the Times’ play for a national (and global) audience has reaped dividends. The local news business is a deeply troubled one.

Since buying the Post, Bezos’ strategic moves have largely been about recapturing that national market. His partnership deals with local newspapers have sold the Post as a membership benefit to subscribers around the country. The new apps they’ve developed are focused on a national audience. (The Prime deal won’t include most local news, which means it should limit cannibalization of D.C. subscribers.) Bezos hasn’t talked much about his Post strategy publicly, but see what he said in this Business Insider talk around 46:45:

The big change we’re making at the Post is, the Post was always, even though it had a national and global reputation, the product was a local product. And that was by design, and I think for the time, it was a very good strategy, and the Post as a business was super successful for decades. But that is what we’re changing. We are in the process of remaking the Post in that way so that it can also be — we will continue to do good local coverage in Washington, D.C. — but the Post has the good fortune to be the newspaper of the capital city of the United States of America. And that’s a great place to starting point to being a national and even a global publication.

In terms of strategy, that’s a direct shot at the Times, which has been dominant in that national-general-interest-premium-publisher space. Adding in the scale of other newspaper publishers is one thing, and not a driver of revenue. Adding in a potential national (and global) audience via Prime is a big boost to that effort.

— This is a technology strategy as well as a business one. If you want to produce a national, digital, general-interest news product, you don’t want to be hamstrung by newspaper design, newspaper workflows, and newspaper structures. You want to create something new. That’s just what the Post has been doing, and my Press Publish interview with the Post’s Cory Haik is, in retrospect, a nice window into the sort of restructuring they’ve done to prepare for this moment.

Honolulu Civil Beat, a local news site backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, launched in 2010 with an ad-free business model built on digital subscriptions. About a year later, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser put up a paywall of its own. The move set up a showdown between the two news organizations as they competed for subscribers.

The fight, however, is fizzling. The trajectory of each publication’s paywall appears to be mimicking industry-wide trends of slow paywall growth: It looks as if there’s a limit in the number of people who are willing to pay for news online.

The Star-Advertiser and Civil Beat are privately held companies, so it’s difficult to get a full picture of their finances, but publicly available information indicates that their paywall efforts are stalling.

When Civil Beat launched in 2010, it charged $19.99 per month for a subscription. It offered a launch discount and occasional special deals, then in 2013 lowered the cost of a subscription to $9.99 per month.

Starting today, our regular subscription price has DROPPED to only $9.99 a month http://t.co/VzZmWzzXJa

— Honolulu Civil Beat (@CivilBeat) October 14, 2013

Earlier this year, Civil Beat dropped its price again. A monthly subscription now costs $4.99, and the site is heavily promoting the new price.

New to Civil Beat? Subscribe now for $4.99 a month http://t.co/abWbNLk51q pic.twitter.com/U65aN5mBr8

— Honolulu Civil Beat (@CivilBeat) May 9, 2015

Civil Beat wouldn’t disclose how many subscribers it has, but Heidi Pliszka, the company’s director of business operations, told me in an email that the site continues “to grow [its] readership year over year.”

Meanwhile, at the Star-Advertiser, the number of digital subscribers has fallen slightly after remaining flat for the past couple of years. At the end of 2014, the paper had an average of 20,257 paid weekday, non-replica digital subscribers, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. That’s a slight decrease from 22,714 digital subscribers in 2013 and 22,469 in 2012, according to AAM’s report.

A digital-only subscription to the paper starts at $4.17 per month for readers in the continental United States and abroad. But Star-Advertiser digital subscriptions in the paper’s delivery area are more expensive: $10.42 per month on Oahu and $6.25 in the rest of Hawaii. (If you live in Oahu, you can get unlimited digital access and print delivery for $8.95 — a recognition of the fact that print advertising is still crucial.)

These subscriber trends are being felt on the mainland as well. Just look at The New York Times, which is on pace to reach 1 million digital subscribers this year but is finding that there may be a limit to how many people are willing to pay for digital access. Last year, the Times killed its paid opinion app due to lack of interest, and this spring, it made its NYT Now app free after struggling to attract subscribers for the lower-priced digital product.

That hasn’t stopped others from trying to launch reader-supported news sites. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Robert E. Lorton III, whose family used to own the Tulsa World, debuted the Tulsa Frontier, a for-profit investigative site that’s charging subscribers $30 per month. The Frontier aims to sign up 1,000 subscribers in its first year, and wants to have 2,500 total by the end of its second year.

The Winnipeg Free Press also introduced a paywall this spring, becoming the first newspaper in North America to offer readers the option of paying by the article instead of buying a monthly subscription.

A 2013 study from the University of Missouri found that 70 percent of daily newspapers in the United States charge for content online. That same Missouri study found that newspapers rarely conducted user research before implementing paywalls. University of Texas professor Talia Stroud, director of the Engaging News Project, wrote about the study for the American Press Institute last fall:

Less than three in 10 dailies conducted focus groups, fielded audience surveys, or tested paywalls with a subset of site visitors prior to moving to paid content. Academics, one possible resource for modeling the financial effects of paywalls, were consulted by 15 percent of publishers. The most common practice employed by publishers was to solicit advice from their peers. According to Jenner and his colleagues, 85 percent consulted with other newspapers.

While large general-interest publications have struggled with paywalls, some niche sites have seen some success with the model. Outlets such as technology site The Information and Atlantic Media’s National Journal membership program seem to be succeeding because professionals in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. are willing to put down significant cash (a subscription to the Information costs $399 annually) for information that’s relevant to their work. Similarly, high-end publications such as The Economist have been able to find audiences willing to pay for their content. The Economist’s circulation grew to 1.6 million print and digital subscribers last year, and Economist deputy editor Tom Standage told me in March that a majority of The Economist’s revenue comes from subscriptions:

The proportion of revenue that’s coming from subscriptions is going up, and will probably continue to go up. So I’m very, very happy that that’s our business model, because I think that’s sustainable. People do seem willing to pay for our journalism, and our digital subscriber numbers are going up very nicely.

National Journal has, in fact, doubled down on its paid services. Earlier this month it said it would kill off its print magazine to focus more on its paid strategy. National Journal’s membership program provides members with access to its research arm, which puts together unique reports and presentations for them.

“It’s a more strategic relationship than when a media company is producing lots of content for them to read,” National Journal Group CEO Tim Hartman told the Lab recently.

Another trend media companies are (or at least should be) familiar with? The continued rise of mobile. The number of people using smartphones to access news has jumped to 46 percent from 37 percent last year, according to the report.

The annual study from the Reuters Institute weighs in at over 100 pages, digging into how people discover and read the news, the growth of new platforms, how people pay (or don’t) for news, and a country-by-country breakdowns of the top brands, social networks, and devices. You can read the whole thing here, or check out the top findings in 100 seconds:

Here’s a few things that I thought were interesting in this year’s report.

News apps vs. mobile sites

As smartphone usage surges upward, users may be getting news on their devices, but they may not be seeking out apps from news providers. The report found that 70 percent of smartphone users have a news app on their phone or tablet, but just one in three actually use it during a typical week.

The Reuters Institute also found that many readers prefer to use their browser over dedicated news apps:

Finding the news

Publishers in the U.S. have been dealing with declines in homepage traffic for years, and that trend continues around the world, according to the report. But the ways people discover news, through social, search, or push notifications on their phones, varies by country. In the U.K., Denmark, and Finland, the majority of readers still start by going directly to a website; in Italy, Spain, Japan, and Brazil, the majority use search to find their news.

In the U.S., 40 percent of those surveyed preferred search, compared to 36 percent who go directly to a site, and 35 percent who use social media.

The report found that email and social served different needs for different audiences:

In looking at email and social media in four countries (US, UK, Ireland, and France) we find that, on average, email is used more by older groups, whereas social media are more heavily used by the young. Email tends to be accessed as part of a daily habit, often at the start of the day, whereas social media are used throughout the day, with more of a peak in the late evening. Social media are used more for breaking news, entertainment, sport, and technology, while email is — relatively — more popular for business and politics.

The report’s findings are similar to those of the Pew Research Center on how people use Twitter and Facebook to discover news. While Facebook remains the most important social network for news, 57 percent of respondents said they mostly see news there while doing other activities. Conversely, 62 percent of respondents said they see Twitter as a useful way of getting news.

Who pays for online news?

And now for the not good news: “Meanwhile, in our survey, we see no discernible trend towards an increase in paid online content — or in willingness to pay.” The report found in most countries the number of people paying for online news is close to 10 percent, rising as high as 14 percent in Finland and sinking as low as 6 percent in the U.K.

The numbers aren’t favorable for any publisher considering a digital subscription strategy: In the U.S., 68 percent of respondents said they would never pay for online news, no matter what the price. In Spain, 59 percent said they wouldn’t pay at any price; the number jumps to 75 percent in the U.K.

Avoiding advertising

As media companies try to develop new business models to sustain their work, the audience is also becoming aware of the changes. According to the report, 35 percent of respondents said they frequently or often see sponsored content. But just because they’ve seen it, that doesn’t mean they’re sure what sponsored content is:

For example, one member of our focus group in the US confidently and spontaneously talked about seeing more native advertising. However, once we delved further into it, we found they were actually describing retargeted advertising, based on their browsing history.

Readers may not entirely know what it is, and they may not like it: In the U.S., 43 percent of respondents said they have felt disappointed or deceived after reading an article and realizing it was sponsored, the report said. In the U.K., 33 percent of readers said they also felt disappointed or deceived.

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that readers are increasingly using adblocking software: The report found that 47 percent of respondents in the U.S. and 39 percent in the U.K said they regularly use adblockers.

Though rumored and discussed for some time, it’s still a significant shift for the company, which originally launched the app as a cheaper alternative to a full Times subscription, specifically focused on younger, more smartphone-centric readers. At $8 a month, it was about half the price of the cheapest digital subscription to the Times.

But even that price was too high to attract a substantial paying audience. The Times captured a reported 20,000 subscribers, and a majority of NYT Now users were full Times subscriptions who had the app thrown in as a benefit. And so Paywalls 2.0 shifts to NYT Now 2.0.

Inside the company, the app was seen as a creative and technological success, if not a financial one. In a January memo to staff, Times executive editor Dean Baquet wrote:

We have made clear that NYT Now was not a financial breakthrough. But it has been a tremendous journalistic success, showing up on almost every ranking of best new apps. We learned many significant lessons from building NYT Now. We realized we could be more visual, and talk to readers in a different, less formal way, and still be The New York Times. We are exploring how we can make NYT Now a financial success.

That exploration has turned it into a ad-supported model that could let the app — which has been consistently well reviewed — reach a broader audience of phone-heavy readers. Some of those might eventually graduate up to the full Times experience, but there’ll be ads to serve to those who don’t.

NYT Now 2.0 collapses its first two tabs — a selection of Times stories and a curated assemblage of stories from elsewhere — into one stream, with the Times stories on top. (Who’s getting link love from the Times? This morning the app featured Vanity Fair, Quartz, BuzzFeed, Jezebel, Slate, Pacific Standard, Rolling Stone, and Deadline, among others.)

NYT Now's secret weapon: amazing editors. Story selection (from the NYT + across the web) is smart & surprising. Best "blog" in the world.

— Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) May 11, 2015

The app previously allowed only 10 free stories a month to non-subscribers; now users will be able to read 10 selected Times stories at any given time and 20 or 30 stories over a 24-hour period, Times spokeswoman Linda Zebian said.

@AntDeRosa Old app was 10 free articles a month. @NYTNOW 2.0: all NYT articles free, all the time.

— Clifford Levy (@cliffordlevy) May 11, 2015

The stories themselves are still basically unchanged, what you’d see in a smartphone mobile browser or the Times’ full app. The app now lets readers know how many new stories have been added at launch, and the bullet-point-centric morning and evening news roundups now come with optional push notifications when they’re ready.

As the Times marches closer to 1 million digital subscribers, the company has spent the last few years trying to find ways to diversify its paid offerings. NYT Now, along with the short-lived NYT Opinion app, were supposed to be the next phase in generating more revenue from readers. But slow subscriber pickup pushed a switch in models, including a greater reliance on brand advertising. As app team leader Cliff Levy put it to Ken Doctor last fall:

…we realized that perhaps we went too fast toward monetizing NYT Now and NYT Opinion. Maybe in the future, a better path is to first do audience development and then do monetization.

When NYT Now debuted, one concern was that existing Times subscribers would find the app was “enough Times for them” and downgrade from a full print or digital subscription to eight bucks a month. Making the app completely free would seem to be an even greater potential risk.

@cliffordlevy @AntDeRosa I feel conflicted about this. Paying for NYTNow eased my guilt about not paying for news most of the time.

— Kaleigh Rogers (@KaleighRogers) May 11, 2015

My favorite news app, @NYTnow, is becoming free. Was happy to pay for it but I guess that wasn't enough. http://t.co/7X3qwDyTlh

— Stuart A. Thompson (@stuartathompson) April 15, 2015

That’s what happened last summer, when The New Yorker brought down the gates to its archive, making stories dating back to 2007 all free. The free ride was all part of the magazine’s relaunch of NewYorker.com, with the idea of introducing the redesigned site to old and new readers by giving people a chance to wander through the stacks for five months. Not only were there shopping lists of what you should be grabbing from the back catalog, but also lists of the lists of what you should be putting into your delayed reading queue of choice.

Instead, what readers are looking for is a persistent connection to the magazine and their favorite writers. One early sign of that? Thompson said readers of The New Yorker’s newsletters have the highest likelihood of becoming subscribers.

The metric they’re most interested in right now isn’t unique visitors or pageviews, but time spent reading, Thompson said. They know people spent an average of about 17 minutes reading Ian Parker’s Jony Ive profile. The numbers for the magazine’s collections, bundles of stories from the archive around topics like directors, crime, or love, are even higher: an average of 53 minutes spent reading, according to Thompson.

Optimizing paywalls is no longer a new science for media. Following The New York Times’ introduction of its digital subscription plan in 2011, hundreds of publishers have followed with their own variations on the metered model. For many, the early results are a combination of increased subscribers — at least at first — and in some cases declining traffic.

But The New Yorker wasn’t switching from open to meter, as most newspapers were. Its old access model, with its tiny blue locks denoting which stories were only offered to subscribers, had the effect of hiding much of the magazine’s best work. “We really wanted to expose readers to the great content. When you have an article behind the little blue lock, you couldn’t promote it,” said Monica Ray, vice president of consumer marketing for Condé Nast.

Ray credits The New Yorker’s readership gains to audience research and analysis that took place in the months leading up to the site relaunch and the period when the archive was open. Rather than complicate the paywall by weighing features and blog posts differently, they decided all stories would be equal. Placing the meter at six stories means things like “Diary of The Left Shark” and Adam Green’s profile of master pickpocket Apollo Robbins count the same. “We wanted to find a place where you got enough to read, but we weren’t giving you everything,” she said.

The overall goal, through the redesign and the meter, is accessibility, both in technology and tone. As the rush on the archive proved, there is already a firm, and vocal, audience for The New Yorker. Ray said they need to keep expanding, which means reaching people who either don’t know The New Yorker or have misconceptions about magazine. “I think the ability to promote stories more has helped us a lot, so people are coming to the website,” she said.

It’s all part of a continuing adaptation to the ways readers are interacting with The New Yorker, deputy editor Pamela McCarthy told me. Launching the new site and developing a more digital-friendly New Yorker is a process that requires being “deliberate as we move quickly,” she said. That’s not so much a technical process as an editorial one, as the magazine has tasked parts of its famous fact-checking and copy-editing apparatus with working at the speed of the web. What that looks like, McCarthy said, is a system much closer to how newspapers handle their daily reporting. “We know that our colleagues at the Times, The Washington Post — they get things largely right and they don’t have an army of fact-checkers,” she said.

The payoff has been an increase in readers who look for what the magazine’s writers have to say daily rather than just weekly. “Having longtime staff writers be able to respond to events quickly, and in shorter form, is really important and rewarding,” she said.

As The New Yorker grows, the distinctions between how different people connect to the brand may become less important. There’s a new TV show through Amazon and a growing collection of podcasts. It’s long been a media leader in events with its New Yorker Festival; last month, they held a storytelling event in conjunction with The Moth Radio Hour.

Even as they move in all those directions outside of print, the goal will be to maintain — and translate — the New Yorker identity that people respond to, McCarthy said. “I don’t know where it’s all going. I don’t know. But our goal is to be nimble. And to be able to respond to the next thing that comes along,” McCarthy said.

The New York Times is considering a cheaper version of its digital subscription as it continues to look for ways to get more revenue out of consumers.

According to a survey sent to readers this week, the new offering would give users 30 articles a month for $8, over 45 percent lower than the current cheapest offering. Now, for readers who hit the paywall at 10 articles, digital access starts at $15 a month for access to NYTimes.com and Times smartphone apps.

Good on the Times for testing out new pricing strategies, and I wish them the best. What the Times does here will have a broader effect on the many other American newspapers who’ve launched paywalls and found their initial subscriber growth stall or reverse course.

But I have to think if an underwhelming number of people are willing to pay for NYT Now — a very polished product with a lot of added value — this isn’t going to be a revolutionary money maker for the paper. As always, the biggest leap in pricing is from free to 1 cent — the act of paying (and committing to future payment, in a subscription) is the bigger hurdle than $6 vs. $8 vs. $15.

That said…unlike NYT Now, the cost of developing this new product should be relatively minimal, and maybe it makes sense to get whatever marginal dollars you can from the price sensitive. Apple has famously, even with a stripped down product strategy, sought to offer products at a variety of stair-stepped price points:

Tim Cook once said he wanted to make sure “that we don’t leave a price umbrella for people” — in this case meaning a market opening for non-Apple tablets that would be substantially cheaper than the iPad. But (a) the iPad’s market share has been dropping substantially anyway. And (b) in the case of tablets, an expensive product is competing with a less expensive product. In online news, any paid product is competing with free.

Meanwhile, Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo reported, based on a reader survey that was recently sent out, that The Times is considering another subscription option, this one in print: A condensed print edition that would be about half the price of the current paper.

— First Look Media, the news venture founded last year by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, announced a shift this week in a blog post by Omidyar. Instead of building a family of “digital magazines” as it had initially intended, it will focus on the two it’s already launched — one built around Glenn Greenwald’s work and another around Matt Taibbi’s — while planning on doubling its staff to 50 and centering its work on more tech-based experimentation with news. Jay Rosen, a consultant to First Look, offered his interpretation of the announcement, as did the Lab’s Justin Ellis and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram.

— The Washington Post announced that it will launch Storyline, a sister site to Wonkblog, which had been piloted by Ezra Klein, who’s since departed to found Vox. The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone and Poynter’s Benjamin Mullin both gave some details about The Post’s plans: It will center on policy issues, and will be data-driven and topic-oriented.

— The New Yorker relaunched its website last week, a move that includes the addition of a metered paywall. The Guardian’s Hannah Jane Parkinson went through the redesign, and Capital New York’s Nicole Levy and Peter Sterne went deep into what’s at stake with the overhaul.

— E. W. Scripps and Journal Communications announced a deal in which they will merge their broadcast operations and spin off their newspapers into a separate company. Here at the Lab, Joshua Benton explained how the move marks a trend of media companies looking to narrow their portfolios after years of talk of diversification.