If you read an earlier version, I completely misunderstood Chuck on Friday. He was NOT referring to a paid phone app; it was a pay site. Thus the whole premise of the post was wrong. Thus the embarrassment on my face. Thus the rewrite below:
Chuck Finder visited on Friday as part of the Missourian’s board of directors meeting. Chuck, a longtime sports editor and reporter, described an interesting variation of pay sites at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Chuck says the PG+ “started out with way too many things: politics, op-eds, features, radio-TV-movie stuff — and videos of all of the above, too. but they scaled it back to only sports.”
The underlying promise to those who purchase $3.99-monthly subscriptions to the “pay site” is that they will get the news, live updates and analyses first.
For instance, our Steelers writer on Sunday posted injuries on the pay site first. At Pirates games, we post the daily lineup and clubhouse/pregame news on one thread, do a live blog during the game, then immediately post the breaking-news story and follow it after midnight with a minor-league farm team roundup and what we call Morning Links — a game/theme wrap-up with links to all that days Pirates stories on our site, plus any other relative/Pirates-pertinent stories we found elsewhere on Google News searches. Yeah, we spoil our dang Pirates readers, but after 18 consecutive losing seasons someone has to!
Sports writers can and do post directly to the site, and there are live chats between readers and writers. There are blogs from users as well.
You can see the site — the newspaper offers 10 free views. Check it out.
Chuck asks: Is it worth considering for the Missourian? A paid Vox entertainment site?
Hmmmm.
It is inevitable that at some point we will have to charge readers to access content online. When and how are the tricky questions.
I definitely think that if we were to start something like this, sports should be the first section that people would need to pay for. Simply by checking analytics, it is so obvious that MU Football is about the only thing this town cares about. Make them pay for that and see if it works.
Another thing that jumped out at me was the idea of sports reporters posting directly to the site. Is it treated as a blog or is there some sort of editing process too?