By SHAI FOX SAVARIAU

The Dallas Morning News recently had to take down its paywall for online digital subscribers because it turned out that it wasn’t doing as well as managers thought it would.

At first, publisher Jim Moroney stated that the paywall would only hinder the paper.

That was in 2009.

After putting the paywall into effect in 2011, Moroney then stated in 2012 that the paywall was “very satisfying” and that it drew many subscribers in the first year. In May of this year, Moroney decided to input a meter model, like the one that The New York Times has previously adopted. This is where a certain number of articles are available for free but then after the monthly limit is reached, readers must pay a subscription to see additional articles.

As it turns out, the copy-cat attempt flopped.

In my opinion, it’s interesting to see how newspapers are having to adjust to the digital age. Since print newspapers are not doing as well as before in creating revenue, newspaper companies have to find new ways of gaining income.

What this paper did wrong was that it input a hard paywall that barely allowed articles to be seen for free and THEN put a model meter after.

Other papers are struggling with this same dilemma. Paywalls seem unreasonable,  especially when there are ways of getting news for free, but when it comes to these small papers, they have to make sure some type of money is coming in for their online news services. I agree that paywalls are completely necessary for the journalism world these days. Unfortunately, these smaller papers are not The New York Times and have to be more efficient to maintain their profits.

Other papers need to just follow what The New York Times did. It’s a much more larger and more popular newspaper. They set the standard for every other paper, in a sense.  Constantly changing the strategy of your online newspaper’s website is not a good marketing idea.

Original article found here: http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_dallas_morning_news_drops.php