Newsday to charge readers for access to its website
Newsday will become one of a handful of American newspapers to charge readers for access online, starting later this month, the newspaper said yesterday.
The potential paying customer base for Newsday.com is limited, because people who subscribe to Cablevision or to Newsday in print - 75 percent of Long Island households, the company said - would continue to have free, unrestricted access to the site.
The paper, owned by Cablevision, plans to charge $5 a week, or about $260 a year, which is considerably more than digital subscriptions to the small number of other American papers that charge. The basic price for online access to The Wall Street Journal is $149 a year, and the paper frequently offers discounted subscriptions at lower prices.
Papers have been wrestling with erecting toll gates online, weighing projections for revenue gain against those for lost readership and digital advertising.
