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?
Paywalls
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Dr Lobster*
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Nick Harvey
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We're mostly Newsquest titles round here and they're sort-of half behind a paywall.
You get 20 page reads, then they want you to pay for any more.
Not sure whether they realise that you just clear your cookies and carry on.
You get 20 page reads, then they want you to pay for any more.
Not sure whether they realise that you just clear your cookies and carry on.
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Dr Lobster*
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- Joined: Sat 30 Aug, 2003 20.14
yep - it's clumsily implemented here as well - you can just bypass the popup by clicking the reader mode button in your browser.Nick Harvey wrote: ↑Thu 03 Oct, 2024 12.44 We're mostly Newsquest titles round here and they're sort-of half behind a paywall.
You get 20 page reads, then they want you to pay for any more.
Not sure whether they realise that you just clear your cookies and carry on.
i'm sure a lot of these things are just bolted onto some ancient bespoke CMS system which it why it takes a while for them to stop these kinds of problem, but i just think, they are charging £4.99 a month or £54 a year for the plus subscription - that's got to be a lot people siging up to that and paying per month for it to make sense - and of coursem unless people do pay the advertising impressions are going to be practically zero.
Not sure i understand the stategy myself, will be interesting to see if they row back from it - at least on some titles.
Upload service: http://www.metropol247.co.uk/uploadservice
The most galling one is the Mirror website saying in order to reject cookies you need to pay. Who is going to do that? I just close the article and go somewhere else.
Realistically no one will pay for it but the point is to essentially force you into agreeing to accept cookies if you want to read the article.
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Martin Phillp
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The two local titles here are largely free online.
Southwark News used to be fully paywalled, but has once again become free again, but will charge you 50p to read an online version of the newspaper.
The South London Press is free, but has merged two other London local newspapers the London Weekly News which covers the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham and The Mercury which covers SE London from Lewisham to Bexley, so isn't exactly 'local'
Unlike most local titles which are owned by Reach or Newsquest, both of my local titles are independent.
Southwark News used to be fully paywalled, but has once again become free again, but will charge you 50p to read an online version of the newspaper.
The South London Press is free, but has merged two other London local newspapers the London Weekly News which covers the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham and The Mercury which covers SE London from Lewisham to Bexley, so isn't exactly 'local'
Unlike most local titles which are owned by Reach or Newsquest, both of my local titles are independent.
TVF's London Lite.
It would be interesting to see what the ICO had to say about that if a complaint was raised. I'd be surprised if that complied with UK GDPR
I've always found https://12ft.io/ to be very useful in reading news articles from paywalled websites.