Blurred Keys

Just a week after we wrote about the Irish Times adding a second pay barrier, the New York Times reported on their now demolished pay wall for all articles after 1987. (vie tomrafteryit.net)

Meanwhile, another US newspaper currently operating a pay wall looks
to be going the same way. "That looks like the way we’re going," Rupert
Murdoch said when talking of the online version of the Wall Street Journal. (vie Greenslade)

Although speculation has been growing since News Corp’s first moves
to buy Dow Jones, Murdoch’s latest comment are the clearest sign yet
that the wsj.com’s pay wall will be also dropped once News Corp takes
full control of Dow Jones.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” said Vivian L Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com. The NY Times have learned lessons, Murdoch and co also have a real understanding how the internet works… but, does the Irish Times?

Last year we reported how the Irish Times said that Ireland.com is a success, and nearly a break even levels. Page
impressions were at 15m at the time, that’s down from 25m pre paid subscription. Larger amounts of users is really what advertisers want to hear about. And with online advertising growing and broadband usage growing in Ireland, the IT would want to be asking is it missing out on growth, and readers who may become loyal to other news sites.

On another level, the Irish Times is, apparently, "an independent newspaper primarily concerned with serious issues for
the benefit of the community throughout the whole of Ireland, free from
any form of personal or party political, commercial, religious or other
sectional control," maybe they think less people reading the Irish Times content is for
the benefit of the community throughout the whole of Ireland?

ALSO READ: Is circulation revenue worth having now that advertisers love free titles?

- New yearly subscription costs €395

The Irish Times has launched a "digital archive", it’s addition to the newspaper’s website Ireland.com’s digital text archive.

According to ENN.ie, the “digital” scanned archive was co-funded by the Irish Times Ltd and the Library Council of Ireland through the Department of the Environment.

While the new archive will be free in public libraries and for primary and secondary schools, current paid subscribes will not have access to it.

The Times have developed a new subscription level ‘P+’ or ‘Premium Plus’ for between €395 yearly or €10 for 24-hour access.

The only extra for premium plus users is the scanned archives back to the newspaper’s launch in 1859. It’s a lot of content, but it comes in at over €300 euro extra per year then the normal €79 premium access.

The searchable system is also heavily restricted when it comes to saving content. Content can be saved by viewing ‘printer friendly’ PDF documents, however, text is not selectable as paragraphs appear as images not selectable text.

We tried the first edition of the Irish Times and a further flaw comes as articles that transcend multiple columns appear as different stories in the printer friendly PDFs.

That said, for just reading old editions of the newspaper the system built into Ireland.com works as well as, if not better then, other digital editions readers we’ve seen.

The new system is available for free to current subscribes until the end of the month.

A blog is after all only a publishing system, although digital and versatile their content can vary in similar ways to newspapers or magazines…

There’s nothing stopping a local newspaper using blogging software for publishing news, as what is been done at the Buckinghamshire Advertiser in the UK (vie BuzzMachine). In Ireland, that role is somewhat being filled by bloggers like the Limerick Blogger, but no local newspapers are at it yet.

Meanwhile, the Economist use their ‘the Inbox‘ blog to publish readers’ letters “soon after receipt”.

In off-line conversation somebody questioned the importance we attached to the recent news that the Irish Times are the first national Irish newspaper to start blogging.

There are two reasons to highlight the story; the Irish media are miles behind the media in the UK and other countries when it comes to blogging (partly understandable due to Ireland’s low broadband penetration) and the Irish Times look to be serious about their new project with journalists Jim Carroll, Conor Pope, Shane Hegarty and more to be announced blogging on Ireland.com.

The Irish Times has ventured into blogging for the first time at Ireland.com. The newspaper’s first blog, ‘On the Record’, is hosted by music journalist Jim Carroll.

Along with breaking news and content from the Ticket supplement, the music blog is free-to-view in contrast to much of the site which is subscription based.

While Irish journalists – including Irish Times staff – have been blogging for some time, this is first public move by a national newspaper into blogging.