Star Tribune offers exclusive content to print readers

Posted by Caroline Huber on April 1, 2009 at 3:09 PM

Next week the Minnesota Twin Cities' Star Tribune begins an experiment in which it will offer certain stories to print subscribers before posting them online. While the Star Tribune will continue to publish breaking news stories online right away, readers will have to buy the paper for immediate access to investigative pieces and deeper, more exclusive content.

According to Star Tribune Editor Nancy Barnes in an editorial on StarTribune.com, the purpose of the initiative is to both reward paying print customers and also to experiment with how the publication delivers its content. "We're going to watch and measure the results, collect reader feedback, and let that drive our decisionmaking about whether this is something we want to do permanently."

The special stories will be marked as print exclusives and appear on every section front in the Star Tribune's Sunday paper. Barnes defines the types of stories that will be withheld from online as "investigative projects, deeply reported nonbreaking news stories, beautifully written feature stories -- whatever content we think print readers might value most."

In her editorial Barnes stresses pleasing the paid reader and alludes more subtly to the financial difficulties that have arisen as a result of papers posting all of their stories online for free. She claims that good journalism cannot be produced for free and that the newspapers must produce more valuable content to sustain their printed editions. What Barnes does not explicitly state is that the Star Tribune must maintain print readership so that it can continue to make money, since online editions do not generate much revenue.

As one commenter points out in response to the editorial, the chief purpose of the experiment is likely less to reward Star Tribune readers and more to generate advertising revenue: the exclusive pieces are supposed to work as an incentive to buy the paper. "We [the readers] are simply the measure by which you can charge your advertisers," says commenter forester. He or she also points out that if the story is worthwhile, it will probably make it online somehow, and Barnes herself says that many of the "exclusive" stories will appear on the website later in the week.

Will exclusive content be enough to persuade readers to purchase the newspaper, especially if they only have to wait a few more days to read it online? Is there even such a thing as "exclusive content" anymore with the proliferation of the Web? Newspapers are made to be disposable and to appeal to the reader in a hurry, who is often flipping through looking for interesting and appealing headlines: how many readers will actually be enticed by beautifully written, non-breaking news stories? The Star Tribune will soon find out, and its experiment, whether a success or a failure, might at least answer some questions about trends in print readership.

Source: PaidContent.org, Star Tribune