Is the $3.99 a week subscription fee too steep for students to afford?
By Lisa Randall
In a society where everything can be found on the Internet at the click of the mouse, publishing an online newspaper is no new feat. However, the launch of BostonGlobe.com, an online subscription-based version of The Boston Globe, demonstrates a new direction and a new revenue source for online journalism.
Users can access almost everything on the web without charge. This included users who read The Boston Globe, which existed online for free at Boston.com before BostonGlobe.com’s launch on Sept. 12. Those wanting to take advantage of the new site and its sleeker design must pay the subscription fee of $3.99 a week starting Oct. 1. For most students, this falls at the end of a long list of costly needs like textbooks and food.
“College isn’t cheap,” freshman engineering major Mike Doud said. “Students don’t have money to throw around.”
But for some, sacrificing a slice of pizza or a three-subject notebook may be worth the site’s new upgraded features.
“The Boston Globe has made use of HTML5 so the paper essentially formats itself to whatever device you’re using,” said journalism professor Dan Kennedy.
HTML is a language for structuring and presenting content on the web. The fifth version, HTML5, aims to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understandable by computers and devices.
Whether accessed on an iPad, iTouch, laptop or smart phone, the pages of BostonGlobe.com. adjust to fit the screen, making it extremely user-friendly.
“BostonGlobe.com employs a unique, responsive design making it adaptable and very readable on mobile devices,” Editor of BostonGlobe.com Jason Tuohey said in an email to The News.
Kennedy agreed that the website is an “impressive piece of technology” that is very “clean and simple.”
The layout of BostonGlobe.com gives it a distinctly print-like feel with the goal of making it easier for users to navigate, Kennedy said. It features fewer ads than Boston.com and has the convenience of continuous articles that readers don’t have to click the “next page” button to finish.
Doud agreed that the site itself is “esthetically pleasing” and noted that in comparison to its counterpart Boston.com, BostonGlobe.com features more in depth articles. Boston.com will still be available free for users and will continue to offer breaking news and sports coverage, community conversations, blogs, daily deals, entertainment listings, photo gallaries, and classifieds, along with limited offerings from that day’s Globe.
“BostonGlobe.com will have all articles from the newspaper, most of which will not be available on Boston.com,” Tuohey said. “We estimate that 3/4 of the paper will be on BostonGlobe.com.”
On whether or not Boston.com will continue to suffice for news-readers hoping to avoid payment, Kennedy said there’s no conclusive answer because it depends what they’re looking for.
Based on Tuohey’s comments, however, those seeking the more complete model of the Globe need to pay up.
Despite the upgrade, some students are still unsure as to whether or not it is worth the subscription fee, while some students feel that the choice is not necessarily their own.
Journalism majors and others who elected to take classes such as Interpreting the Day’s News and Journalism 1 and 2 are expected to read The Boston Globe daily.
Freshman physical therapy major Kate Ridgeway, who is taking Interpreting the Day’s News, is among those not so ready and willing to invest the almost $3.99 a week towards the news.
“This class is just a one-semester elective for me to learn about Boston news,” she said, adding that she is from New Jersey and Boston news has yet to affect her.
Ridgeway’s classmate Doud agrees and said that if it weren’t for his Interpreting the Day’s News class, he would not read the paper as much, making the subscription fee even more of an inconvenience.
Though the charge is set at $3.99 per week, the site is already known to have a leaky paywall, providing Internet users with back-door access to the paper, Kennedy said. Globe articles shared through social networking sites such as Twitter can be clicked on by readers and then fully accessed for free. Additionally, articles found through search engines can be accessed similarly.
Tuohey said The Globe will implement a “first-click-free strategy.” This means that readers will be able to access the first article they click through Google or social networking sites for free once, but will be prevented from doing so again.
“We won’t have a metered model, as The New York Times does,” he added, alluding to that paper’s strategy of providing 20 free articles per month to users before blocking access.
Though it’s possible to evade the subscription fee, these methods may be inconvenient enough for readers to surrender to the payment. However, the question remains if any of this revenue will come from college readers.
“Once the semester [of Interpreting the Day’s News] is over, I don’t see myself continuing to subscribe to the news,” Doud said. “But who knows, maybe this site could change that.”
