From Monday The Irish Times’ website will be free to access, according to an article on page three of today’s newspaper written by the Editor Geraldine Kennedy.
The site is moving to irishtimes.com and ireland.com will become a separate, commercial site.
The new site will offer ‘richer content in the form of pictures, graphics, audio and video’. The article also talks about developing many multimedia features.
People who are paid-up subscribers to the site will get a full refund, or as Ms Kennedy notes could instead become members of the new Irish Times Crossword Club. In fact they can try out the new club before making a decision. Although with this economic downturn upon us I can imagine what most will do…cash is king after all!
You can read the story online here, I’d have put it up earlier but couldn’t find it free-to-view at first.
Going to digest this story a little this morning and write more on what they plan for their new website later on.
This is deadly, there have been numerous times where I’ve wanted to check out something on ireland.com and been stopped by the dreaded ‘give us money’ prompt.
Bout time I guess, this is the 21st century. I wonder how long the rest of these subscription sites will hold out for cash. I mean, honestly, who pays for access to hotpress.com?
It is great, the subscription model is dead for newspapers. However, many magazines are still subscriber based and I imagine it will stay that way for a while yet. I think magazines like Hotpress should offer more for free, at the moment only some of their news stories are free, they should offer all of those for non-subscribers and keep their features etc, behind the ‘give us money’ prompt!