Free Press & News putting up paywall on Aug 12

[Deleted User 13307]

Honestly, I'm shocked this didn't happen a long time ago with how prevalent ad blocking is now.

It'll be interesting to see if it helps or hurts their bottom line.

[Momo]

As of last Wednesday, & without notice, the longtime practice of allowing subscribers to one of the papers the ability to access the other paper's e-edition was terminated.

[Bobbert]

You knew it was coming, considering how many other newspapers have done it. MLive starting doing it a few weeks ago, at least with the Ann Arbor News.

[Matt]

9

You knew it was coming, considering how many other newspapers have done it. MLive starting doing it a few weeks ago, at least with the Ann Arbor News.

MLive is trash and I think they are charging $10/month for a "membership". A Freep.com subscription is going to be $3 for the first 3 months.

[Turkeytop]

Hard times for the newspaper business. The Tampa Bay Times has reduced their print edition to two days a week.

[WOHO]

Toledo Blade down to Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday. Noticed that many store dropped the Sunday ads: no more Walgreens insert and Best Buy dropped out months ago. Only Target, Menard's, CVS are regulars in the Sunday paper anymore.

[MrMitch]

It seems all news sites are doing it. If I subscribed to all the sites I like to read it could be $50 a month! Not going to happen. Maybe pick 1 or 2.

[ftballfan]

Surprised it took this long considering most of its sister papers have had paywalls for years now

[SolidGoldDancers]

The problem with newspaper sites is, they want you to subscribe and then they turn around and whore out your reading habits because they have your name and a location, which is exceptionally valuable to third-party trackers and ad companies like Criteo.

Hard pass on that. I used to support a local and a large paper with a subscription, but would read it without signing-in. Once they paywalled it, I ended the subscription because signing in resulted in even more third-party javascript and trackers. When I inquired as to what data was being collected and how it was used, one ignored me and the other pointed to their privacy policy that didn't mention a thing about all the third-party bullshit on their site.

Many US papers won't even permit readers covered by GDPR to access their sites because what they are doing involves serious privacy concerns. Especially WaPO, where "Democracy dies in a darkness"...but your reading habits keeps the lights lit.

[SixPlusOne]

Hard times for the newspaper business.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for these pigs. Years ago most newspapers reduced their content to 1/32 of what it used to be. I am specifically talking about the actual physical newspaper that can come to your door or you buy at a store. Each section is about 2 pages and has become less than the thickness of tissue paper.

[wtfdetroit]

They let the cat out of the bag by making it free all these years and the quality/content is garbage now. It's all clickbait and syndicated stores. The hard hitting local news has disappeared since 2008. What does $3 for the first 3 months mean? How must is it after that? I'm going to pass on that. I pay The NY Times $1 a week and their quality is much higher.

[Momo]

They let the cat out of the bag by making it free all these years and the quality/content is garbage now. It's all clickbait and syndicated stores. The hard hitting local news has disappeared since 2008. What does $3 for the first 3 months mean? How must is it after that? I'm going to pass on that. I pay The NY Times $1 a week and their quality is much higher.

What Times content do you get for $1 a week?

[km1125]

Won't miss them.

They made their own bed by the annoying pop-up ads that drove most folks to adopt ad blockers. Then they tried to further take advantage of their viewers with all the tracking mechanisms Serves them right.

[MasterB]

I'm not paying to read the Free Press or News either.

[696lover]

Sometimes they did do real stories, like the eye opening series on the Detroit gang hits and some of the corruption stuff.

But over time, and totally since Trump, both papers mostly exist to prop the Democrats and smear Trump in particular and the right generally, no matter what the actual story or facts.

The journalists had a lot of fun telling all the workers losing their jobs in the 90s and 00s due to Clinton's trade agreement, to learn to code, hahaha

Well, Learn to Code, old timers