Eight lessons from the FT’s digital success

Dorian Benkoil of The MediaThon writes for PBS MediaShift about the lessons that can be gleaned from the Financial Times’ digital success.

Here is one of them:

2. Carefully Protect the Value of the Core Product

Many newspapers, and the news industry in general, are still paying the price for having made their entire library of content available for free.

Content may want to be free, but journalists, editors and a lot of other people working for the company need to be paid.

“The decision we took was always that you have to pay more for digital,” Grimshaw said. “We felt if we bundled in the digital [for free, as many print publications including The New York Times do], you’re effectively sending a signal to the reader that digital is not worth that much … Long-term, we felt that would be a huge headache” as people moved to digital.

In fact, digital can be said to be more valuable than print, Grimshaw said, because there’s more available, such as interactivity, added data, rich archives, and more frequent updates.

In the U.S., the FT charges more for digital, $6.25 per week, than print, which costs $5.75 per week. They give only a 50-cent weekly discount to people who subscribe to both.

The publication has about 435,000 digital subscribers, while the newspaper has about 230,000, a spokesperson said, down from a peak of about 450,000 a few years ago. That means the total number of subscribers to the Financial Times has grown, overall.

Read more here.