Washington Post watching online pay experiments
The Washington Post is monitoring efforts by The New York Times and other newspapers to charge readers online but has no plans to do the same for now, the Post Co. chairman said Monday.
"On pay models, obviously what The New York Times is doing is of interest to us," Donald Graham told financial analysts at the UBS 38th Annual Global Media and Communications Conference here.
"We'll be watching it and we wish them well," Graham said, adding that his newspaper was also monitoring pay wall efforts by Rupert Murdoch's The Times.
Acknowledging that the Post would not be a pioneer in fee-based services, Graham said the company would be watching how others implement those approaches.
"There are experiments galore going on in pay models at newspapers all around the country," he added.
"We're quite willing to be followers on this front."
News Corp.'s The Times and The Sunday Times recently began charging readers for full access to their websites and The New York Times has announced plans to begin charging next year for full online access to NYTimes.com.
Graham also said the Post Co. is "investing a little bit in technologies for news delivery generally and we may have something new and interesting to announce before too many months go by."
Like other US newspapers, the Post has been grappling with declining print advertising revenue, eroding circulation and the migration of readers to free news on the Web.
(c) 2010 AFP
