As Eric reported in August, The Dallas Morning News becomes the second major market daily (after the SF Chronicle) to ditch its paywall starting today. The reason, in short, it didn’t actually make money. So, time for a new strategy. Rather than pay for content, the DMN believes you will pay for “how you consume that content,” or in other words, the layout. Via Moroney:
“[Subscribers] were paying for a print experience. Now, we want to see if there are sufficient consumers who will pay for a premium digital experience.”
I’m not a highly paid media consultant so I’m not going to tell you that this is another DMN experimentation that will fail miserably. I’m just a reader of the paper, and I can’t come up with one good reason to pay $11.96 per month for a nifty “image-oriented, collage-style display” (as well as fewer ads). But hey, that’s just me. Good luck guys.
