Paywalls
Posted: Thu 03 Oct, 2024 05.00
This had a reasonably soft launch, but all the local iliffe media titles went behind a paywall on Monday.
You may have never heard of them, but Iliffe publishes many local papers and news sites here in East Anglia, especially titles covering small, often quite poor and deprived towns across the fens.
The sites themselves are quite interesting in that over the last year or so have become quite unusable due to the sheer number of adverts - a level of 1990s geo cities intrusion - they’ve experimented with all sorts of technology to compel you to view the ads, preventing the use of blockers with popups and scripts to prevent you from scrolling the page.
The cost is reasonably inexpensive, but all the stories in the locals I read are pretty banal- planning permission disputes, people being arrested for being drunk/fighting/domestics or drink driving, people falling over in town, etc - no real journalism in the sense of holding local government or MPs to account- they are more interested in getting them writing columns without any kind of challenge.
But I wonder if this is the beginning of the end for many local papers in the region - Facebook comments seem to suggest most people aren’t willing to pay, the publishers themselves scaling back their journalism to cat stuck up a tree type stories seems a certain death spiral.
Have any titles in your area gone completely behind a paywall, and survived?
You may have never heard of them, but Iliffe publishes many local papers and news sites here in East Anglia, especially titles covering small, often quite poor and deprived towns across the fens.
The sites themselves are quite interesting in that over the last year or so have become quite unusable due to the sheer number of adverts - a level of 1990s geo cities intrusion - they’ve experimented with all sorts of technology to compel you to view the ads, preventing the use of blockers with popups and scripts to prevent you from scrolling the page.
The cost is reasonably inexpensive, but all the stories in the locals I read are pretty banal- planning permission disputes, people being arrested for being drunk/fighting/domestics or drink driving, people falling over in town, etc - no real journalism in the sense of holding local government or MPs to account- they are more interested in getting them writing columns without any kind of challenge.
But I wonder if this is the beginning of the end for many local papers in the region - Facebook comments seem to suggest most people aren’t willing to pay, the publishers themselves scaling back their journalism to cat stuck up a tree type stories seems a certain death spiral.
Have any titles in your area gone completely behind a paywall, and survived?