I was disappointed to see this morning that the Jerusalem Post has erected a pay wall for some of their content, including the weekend magazine and the “Christian Edition.”
Dear reader,
The Jerusalem Post is pleased to introduce its Premium Content, featuring online editions of the daily "Jerusalem Post" electronic paper, "The Jerusalem Report," our youth magazine "Dash", The Jerusalem Post’s "Christian Edition" and our easy-Hebrew magazine "Ivrit" and more (click for more details). This service is available exclusively by subscription, for US$8 per month.
As an introductory offer, if you register now you will get free access to these products for the first week of use.
Though the pay model was widely considered a failure in online journalism some years ago, a few news organizations are trying to revive it. I doubt that many will consider the paid content in the Jerusalem Post worth $8 per month, especially as most would be interested in only one of the “editions.” Perhaps the content will improve and more will be attracted to it. Another approach that I believe would work better is the use of “micropayments” to view individual articles. Fortunately, it appears that previous articles can still be accessed from links in this blog.
2 thoughts on “Jerusalem Post Erects Pay Wall”
Greed. May they fail like the Times (thanks to the greed of Murdoch, the father of the pay-wall).Pity though, JPost’s content on matters archaeological is brilliant.
The content has to be paid for one way or another. Advertising has worked exceedingly well for Google and others. The JPost can certainly try this "freemium" approach, but I think the cost/content ratio is too high. Also, I don't think this change will affect the regular reporting of archaeological discoveries. This applies more to the feature stories.