All the news free to print
By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - 0 Comments
‘Brunswick News’ subscribers save $3 on their online subscription if get a hard copy
How much is a newspaper worth in the age of the Internet? If you live in New Brunswick, the answer might be nothing at all. Or perhaps even less.
The Irving family, owners of Brunswick News, which controls most of that province’s newspapers, recently erected a strict paywall for their online products. If you want to read so much as a headline of the Telegraph-Journal, the Daily Gleaner, or any other Brunswick News paper online, you now need a subscription, which at the moment costs $19.95 per month. But under a deal now available on Brunswick News websites, customers can get full online access for $16.95 per month. The only catch? They have to accept physical delivery of a daily paper as well, at no additional cost.
The Irvings are essentially paying online customers $3 a month to take their printed paper six days a week. The company declined to comment on its motives, but the move appears designed to shore up the print advertising business that still provides most newspaper revenues. At the same time, it may hope to entice some online-only customers to become print readers, too. The risk is that, faced with a paywall, customers used to free news online may become readers of no news at all.
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Where all the news is good news
By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments
ZoomNB, a free monthly dedicated to reporting good news only
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Ask a newsagent in Moncton, N.B., about that new local newspaper—ZoomNB, a free monthly dedicated to reporting good news only—and you may hear a funny story: someone dropped a stack of the papers off, then someone entirely different came and picked them all up, and no one’s seen it since. Daniel Mlodecki, ZoomNB’s publisher, agrees he’s heard tell of it—that someone’s conducting some sort of black-plumbing operation against him—but dismisses the yarn as “a little rumour.”
Whatever the case, running a newspaper in New Brunswick is hard work: Brunswick News, owned by the province’s Irving family, holds all its English dailies and most of the weeklies, a situation that prompted a Senate inquiry into media concentration there. Two years ago, the publisher of the Carleton Free Press, a Woodstock, N.B., indie, filed a Competition Bureau complaint accusing Brunswick News of selling ads at predatory prices; the bureau didn’t pursue it and the Free Press closed months later.
