#DME13: Lessons in local paywalls from Phoenix, Arizona

One year ago US publisher Gannett had paywalls on six of its news sites. A year on and Gannett, which owns Newsquest in the UK, now charges subscribers for accessing 78 of its local sites.

Brooke Christofferson, vice-president of market and business development at Gannett, spoke at Digital Media Europe, a three-day conference currently underway in London, sharing the approach taken in Phoenix, Arizona, where she is based.

Gannett has a daily newspaper, called The Arizona Republic, a television channel, called 12 News, and the two share a website, called azcentral.com.

The site launched a metered wall in September, allowing readers to access 20 articles a month before they were required to pay.

There are four subscription options: a digital-only subscription and three different options in print, with readers able to select an option to receive the newspaper on particular days.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, Christofferson explained that "Wednesday and Sunday are two key print days because of the advertising".

"So maybe someone who is not a traditional seven-day reader but still wants it a couple of days a week, particularly those days which are big, meaty reads, big advertising days, they may subscribe to a couple of days a week of print delivery, with full digital access."

There are now 3,500 digital-only subscribers in Phoenix, Christofferson told us in a video interview (below). "Gannett has a goal of being somewhere around 55,000 by the end of the year – which is a very aggressive goal. But we are starting slow and are now starting to do sales efforts and marketing efforts around that."

Lessons

The Phoenix approach has been to follow "three guiding principles", Christofferson explained: "to invest in local, unique content across six platforms; to communicate the value proposition; and make it easy to manage subscriptions".

The news outlet listened to readers and established various "passion topics", areas that are of particular interest. "Sometimes it meant letting go some content," Christofferson told the conference.

Two of the top passion topics were found to be "explore Arizona" and, "Arizona’s economic recovery", she explained. And so the team responded by providing more news and features around those areas.

The Gannett title has also focussed on improving its digital offering with a desktop redesign, improvements to mobile, a PDF pageturner e-newspaper, increased social engagement, and a new weekly tablet magazine, called AZ. The tablet magazine was free at launch and is now part of the paid offering and they are launching an explore Arizona mobile app.

The marketing team focused on retaining loyal subscribers while looking to gain new ones, and encouraging engagement and "deep involvement".

One of the messages they were tasked with communicating was that print subscribers were to experience a 30 per cent price increase. The key was to make it clear why the prices had risen significantly by explaining the new reading options they had in digital, Christofferson explained.

Measuring success

The team is measuring success by looking at factors including digital-only subscriptions, online frequency and growing a digital audience in the 25 to 44 age bracket. (Other success measures are noted on this slide.)

For more on the Gannett model watch the video below of Journalism.co.uk's Sarah Marshall interviewing Brooke Christofferson.

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