Digital publishing news for November 20, 2013
Another major newspaper is joining the ranks of paid online content by enacting a subscription paywall. Denver Post will be putting up its paywall on December 2.
The Denver Post is owned by Digital First Media, which has also reported that it will be implementing paywalls on all but one of its 75 newspaper websites.
The strategy being taken by Denver Post allows casual readers 25 free views on the Post’s desktop site and 99 free views on mobile each month. The article from a Fox affiliate in Denver states, “Readers hoping to consume more than that will have to pay $11.99 per month for a digital-only subscription. The same all-access digital subscription will be also be included in $5.50 per week fee that customers pay to subscribe to the Post’s print edition.”
If this trend continues, most online newspapers will be using paywalls in the future.
Other popular dailies going digital under this initiative by Digital First Media include The Record and Saratogian. John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media stated in a blog post: “After a lot research by our team, we believe an All-Access print-digital subscription initiative is necessary to buy us that proverbial gas in the tank [to make the transition].With the rise of digital and the fall of print, we’re at the point where we can launch a working All-Access subscription model.”
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RSS Getting Some New Help
If you’re familiar with RSS feeds, you probably recognize how they can be difficult to deal with. The onslaught of content can be overwhelming.
A new service called SpecificFeeds makes the task of using RSS much easier. About SpecificFeeds, Ryan Dube writes, “It’s an advanced filtering engine that allows you to subscribe to a website feed, but define exactly what information you want to receive from each feed. It could be only the articles written by certain authors, maybe just articles with a specific tag or tags that you’re interested in, or you can run a full list of keyword filters for words that are mentioned in the title or even the body of the article itself.”
This service is great for publishers who want to syndicate their feeds too.
Mag+ Gets an Update & New InDesign Plugin
Our partner Mag+ has released a new update to their application along with a new plugin for Adobe InDesign. The plugin is now compatible with Adobe InDesign CC. Mike Haney from Mag+ writes, ”In this release is a script that automates the conversion of PDF files into MIBs. Although Mag+ is and always will be a custom-design tool, we know there are times you need to take material from a PDF to Mag+—maybe you have a bunch of back issues to convert, or old sales materials it doesn’t make sense to redesign from scratch.” Sounds like a very handy update for publishers.
Keeping Up to Date with The New York Times Minute
Capital New York is reporting that The New York Times is creating short “bite-sized” videos three times per day. Joe Pompeo writes, “The paper debuted a new video series this morning called “The New York Times Minute,” a thrice-daily, one-minute news segment highlighting three top stories of the moment. It will air every weekday on nytimes.com at 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m. The segments can be updated continuously to accommodate fresh reporting on any of the given stories.” Microsoft is the launch sponsor for the New York Times Minute. Subscribers and nonsubscribers can access the video.
