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Established 2010
Brunswick News, owner of nearly all of New Brunswick's print newspapers, is going to start charging readers to access its content online.
The Chronicle Herald's Brett Bundale reported on Friday that the company would activate a "hard" pay wall on its online newspaper editions today. Brunswick News owns 10 French-language weeklies, six English-language weeklies, and three English-language dailies: Saint John's Telegraph-Journal, Fredericton's Daily Gleaner, and Moncton's Times & Transcript.
The pay wall will ask readers to pay to access any piece of content on Brunswick News' subsidiary website, Canadaeast.com. This strategy differs from pay walls on other sites that allow readers to read a number of free stories before they have to pay, Kelly Toughill writes for J-Source.
Brunswick News editor-in-chief Rob Warner is confident the pay wall will pay off. "I think that content is king, and the information we will have on our website will speak for itself," he said. Some would beg to differ, though. Mark Tunney, a former Telegraph-Journal editor, told Bundale he thought the move was “brave,” but said he's "not terribly optimistic."
Pay walls have worked for some companies, such as the New York Times and Northern News Services, as Bundale notes. He also hints at what's behind the success of those pay walls: for different reasons, those publication's readers can't get the same quality elsewhere. In the case of the Times, it's because, well, it's the Times. Such high-quality content isn't easy to find elsewhere, and their readers are willing to fork over $15 a month to access all that great stuff any time, from anywhere. In the case of Northern News Services, they have so little competition that if their readers want local news, getting through the pay wall is the only way to get it. Though their situation is similar, Brunswick News has the CBC to contend with, Bundale writes.
Before anyone can start evaluating the success of the pay wall, though, it needs to go up. As of 11:00 a.m. EST today, it was possible to access full articles—from the Telegraph-Journal, Daily Gleaner, and Times & Transcript—on Canadaeast.com, without registering or paying. The pages for weekly papers—such as those in Bathurst, Grand Falls, and Sussex—were "temporarily unavailable," though, which could indicate the re-launch is coming soon. Bundale's story notes that there have been significant delays and the new site was originally set to go up in September.
Correction: December 8 This post originally stated that Belinda Alzner wrote the piece for J-Source that's cited above. In fact, Kelly Toughill wrote that article. We have corrected that error.
