Credit to the Times’ online Communities editor, she could have easily made her lecture a ‘don’t talk about the paywall’ affair. Fortunately after an engaging lecture on how newspapers can build and maintain online communities (worth a post in itself, but I think I’ll focus on the money question here) Joanna Geary was willing to take questions on ‘Uncle’ Rupert’s great experiment in monetisation, and there were plenty of them.
There are certain parts of her answers I can’t divulge openly, but she stressed that a key part of the strategy in bringing people behind the paywall was sharing links on social media. I lost count of the number of times she brought up the slide for that.
She’s delighted that the Times has taken this huge leap rather than having the industry remain as a ‘monoculture.’ Overall I got the impression that the Times paywall was put into place despite the editors knowing full well the enourmous risks it presented. It’s been a bold move, though wether it will pay off or not remains to be seen.
