One of Archant's senior executives, Stephan Phillips, attending the WAN-IFRA conference this week, was asked whether the Norfolk-based company would consider putting up a paywall. His reply:
We tried to charge for access to content for the business section of our website about 10 years ago, and it was a complete disaster.
As long as we have competition from the BBC, with the publicly-funded nature of this service and its known ambitions to expand in local markets, it will be impossible for us to have a viable charging mechanism.
I'm not certain that blaming the BBC alone is reasonable. Anyway, Phillips continued:
For regional newspapers in the UK, the best way forward is to publish good websites and to cleverly combine all advertising possibilities from display to sponsorship; to social networks engaging with local communities around themes (our football fan social networks has 160,000 unique visitors a month); or electronic coupons; video with ads; and we have also started using QR codes to link our print products to mobile sites.
So there is a whole range of things you can do rather than charging people to get content.
Source: Editors' weblog
