Free Press & News putting up paywall on Aug 12

[wtfdetroit]

They let the cat out of the bag by making it free all these years and the quality/content is garbage now. It's all clickbait and syndicated stores. The hard hitting local news has disappeared since 2008. What does $3 for the first 3 months mean? How must is it after that? I'm going to pass on that. I pay The NY Times $1 a week and their quality is much higher.

What Times content do you get for $1 a week?

I got this promotion back in the winter where I get digital access to the paper, I don't get access to the crossword though.

[Bobbert]

9

You knew it was coming, considering how many other newspapers have done it. MLive starting doing it a few weeks ago, at least with the Ann Arbor News.

MLive is trash and I think they are charging $10/month for a "membership". A Freep.com subscription is going to be $3 for the first 3 months.

The Ann Arbor News is pretty shallow. It's mostly a mouthpiece for the utopian social engineering projects that emanate from the Ann Arbor city council and the University of Michigan.

They also fixate on certain parts of stories by constant links to those fixations. It gives a distorted view of the story, for example their coverage of the racial controversy in Saline, where they focused on one comment at a meeting and the obstruction of the police in Ypsilanti, where they focused on only one side of the story.

A few months ago, they removed the comments section of the website because it was too much work for their staff. That was the best part of the website because it showed the truth about the story, not just the carefully selected facts of the reporter. Removing the comments section was a betrayal of the commitment that was made when the daily newspaper was cut back about 10 years and the Ann Arbor News pledged to make the website a more interactive experience.

[mr v]

All the MLive print editions are going to Cleveland for printing. They will close the press in Grand Rapids in October. Depending on where you live, your paper will be five or six hours old by the time you receive it.

[Matt]

9

You knew it was coming, considering how many other newspapers have done it. MLive starting doing it a few weeks ago, at least with the Ann Arbor News.

MLive is trash and I think they are charging $10/month for a "membership". A Freep.com subscription is going to be $3 for the first 3 months.

The Ann Arbor News is pretty shallow. It's mostly a mouthpiece for the utopian social engineering projects that emanate from the Ann Arbor city council and the University of Michigan.

They also fixate on certain parts of stories by constant links to those fixations. It gives a distorted view of the story, for example their coverage of the racial controversy in Saline, where they focused on one comment at a meeting and the obstruction of the police in Ypsilanti, where they focused on only one side of the story.

A few months ago, they removed the comments section of the website because it was too much work for their staff. That was the best part of the website because it showed the truth about the story, not just the carefully selected facts of the reporter. Removing the comments section was a betrayal of the commitment that was made when the daily newspaper was cut back about 10 years and the Ann Arbor News pledged to make the website a more interactive experience.

Ryan Stanton is bought and paid for by Christopher Taylor. I'm not sure he's even trying to hide it.

[rugratsonline]

All the MLive print editions are going to Cleveland for printing. They will close the press in Grand Rapids in October. Depending on where you live, your paper will be five or six hours old by the time you receive it.

Or more -- depending on how long it would take to travel on the Turnpike. This will especially be disheartening for readers in places such as Grand Rapids or Bay City, both of which are over 300 miles from Cleveland. And because of early deadlines, what happens Sunday may not be in the paper until Tuesday, or even Wednesday.

[Bobbert]

The Detroit papers have redesigned their web sites. Basically a lot of cleanly arranged rectangles which I find attractive. And I can now access their comment sections through Firefox on Windows 7, which I hadn't been able to do for months with the old design.

Yesterday: https://web.archive.org/web/20200811142 ... tnews.com/

Today: https://www.detroitnews.com/

[craig11152]

What does $3 for the first 3 months mean?

A banner across the top calls it a 90% savings.

[Bobbert]

Just noticed that the new website design shows up on my Windows 7 desktop computer, but not on my Windows 10 laptop computer, which is about eight years newer than the desktop. Strange...

[MWmetalhead]

I have no desire to pay for a digital subscription.

None of the good stuff - which is few & far between in any event - is behind a paywall.

[SolarMax]

I have no desire to pay for a digital subscription.

None of the good stuff - which is few & far between in any event - is behind a paywall.

None Shall Pass, if you, like many others, are using an ad blocker. If they follow typical behavior, in short time, more and more of the "good stuff" will get moved behind that paywall.

[rugratsonline]

None Shall Pass, if you, like many others, are using an ad blocker. If they follow typical behavior, in short time, more and more of the "good stuff" will get moved behind that paywall.

Considering the crappy ads that I see either without a blocker, or dodging a blocker (such as "one weird tricks", special "DMV" news, and "heart attacks" (accompanied with a picture of a leg that appears to have been tourniquetted with a hydraulic drill)), no doubt many people viewing websites without blockers are in the minority. Even the TV stations and networks such as NBC request that you turn off or whitelist your blockers before viewing.

[TomSanders]

Everything on the Internet should be free to view and it's up to the reader to make a voluntary contribution (payment) depending on how valuable he or she thought the content was. Either that, or the writer should be paid on a pay per click basis. This was the "logic" offered me by editors and publishers back when I fancied myself a freelancer. An entire generation has grown up believing this. If it works for The Screaming Pink Possum Literary Quarterly, why can't it work for the News and Freep?

[Deleted User 14896]

Everything on the Internet should be free to view ....

This we are in agreement.

I don't understand why the media sites need the money. Gannett, the owner of the Free Press, net worth 2.56 Billion according to a google search I just did. Comcast, which owns NBC, net worth is $205 billion. I'm sure if I googled the net worth of the owners of each TV and radio station in Metro Detroit, I would get similar results.

How much does it cost to run a website?
Putting up a paywall? Having ads that pop up like a groundhog convention when you are trying to peruse their website?
I'm thinking they cannot possibly need the money. Why would they need to charge anything?

[audiophile]

Those lead lines have been there a long time, and while they were using Flint River water. The differences is nobody really worried about back then.

The GM plants had corrosion issues in the 1950s and hooked to Detroit water supply to resolve it.

[DAC]

I think they are both toast.