Cameron Penney
The Fort Frances Times has decided that content from the Fort Frances Times and Daily Bulletin, such as stories and photos, will no longer be available online for free starting next week.
“What we have found is more and more people are choosing to read the paper online,” noted Times’ office manager and co-owner Linda Plumridge.
“They’re reading it there as opposed to having a paper delivered to their homes,” she explained.
“It means that we have less revenue for the paper so we are going to be discontinuing our free news service.”
Instead, the complete edition of the Fort Frances Times, as well as the Daily Bulletin, will be available to read online with a subscription.
“If we have subscribers that are currently getting the paper delivered, we have a deal for them if they would like to get the online edition, as well, so they could have both,” Plumridge remarked.
“They can get that by calling the Fort Frances Times’ office.”
Subscribers can choose to get an online subscription to both the daily and weekly editions, or just one of the two.
Plumridge conceded that while the web traffic often exceeded 2,000 views on most weekdays, and more than 5,000 on Wednesdays, users only were able to see a small portion of what the paper had to offer.
“We are doing this because we’ve had subscribers who say, ‘Why would we pay if we can get it free,’” she noted.
“If we’ve lost readership because people can read things for free, and why pay if you can get something for free, then we need to look at a different model.
“It takes a lot of people to gather news and produce a newspaper,” Plumridge stressed.
Some content will remain available to any users, such as obituaries, jobs and tenders, and classifieds.
But content such as news and feature stories, letters to the editor, and columns will require a subscription.
“We’re going to have a free digital edition for people to preview for two weeks,” Plumridge noted.
After that, users will be able to purchase a single edition of the paper, or a week-long, month-long, or year-long subscription.
“On the bright note, we have not put all our content online [for] free for years,” Plumridge reasoned.
“If some looked online on Wednesday and saw what was there, they got probably less than 20 percent of what was in the newspaper,” she explained.
“They’ve missed that much that they haven’t seen.”
For example, Plumridge noted about two dozen photos were published in the July 6 edition of the Times, but only four were available to view online.
Weekly content in the Daily Bulletin, such as “Cheers & Jeers” and “A Moment in Time,” never were available online previously.
Now subscribers will be able to read it online with their digital subscription.
“For people that are going to be travelling, we had a lot of ‘snowbirds’ this year that did get the digital edition,” Plumridge recalled.
“During the summer, they get it delivered to their house and during the winter they read it on their computer,” she noted.
People can contact the Times to arrange that option.
The Times is not the only newspaper that’s had to face a choice between free versus paid content online.
Some newspapers offer a limited amount a free content before a subscription is required to continue while others have offered a portion of an article that can be read without a subscription.
“Our loss in subscriber base corresponds to our increase in online readership, but the online readership doesn’t pay the bills,” Plumridge lamented.
“If we had an opportunity for a huge advertising base to pay for the paper, you could maybe do that and people could have it for free and have it both ways,” she reasoned.
“But if you look at where our advertisers are now, there are less of them and more demand for their advertising dollars.”
Plumridge said she believes a great newspaper is produced here—and is worth the value that it costs.
“We have a terrific staff who work very hard to keep our readers informed of what’s happening,” she remarked.
“It takes time to research, edit, layout, and print a story,” she added.
“All those things take time and there’s value in it, and I really hope that other people feel we have value, as well.”
