Surprise news from the New York Times as chief executive officer Janet Robinson is to step down at the end of the month. The news took those inside the and outside the media group by surprise coming as it does at a crucial point in the history of the New York Times newspaper. Earlier this year the paper launched its paywall, which has performed much better than hoped.

The expectation is that whoever takes over from Robinson will be a new kind of CEO and one with a focus squarely on digital. What is clear for now, however is that there is no immediate successor in place. Read More »

Over the past year publications including The Times, Sunday Times and The Economist have adopted paywall business models that require readers to pay for online content.

Depending on who you speak to, it will either work or it won’t. As the debate rages on and publishers try figure out the best model for their business, the web infrastructure across the globe is improving and it is affecting online news distribution. Read More »

A week after The New York Times announced figures to that shows its paywall is working its longtime digital chief Martin Nisenholtz has announced his retirement.

Nisenholtz, a former ad man who spent 16 years at the paper, launched its paywall, as well as insisting that social media was crucial to its success, and leaves the paper in a strong place, but with issues to deal with. Read More »

Yesterday, I blogged on how The New York Times paywall was working as its digital subscriber numbers grow.

Today the Financial Times has issued an update on how its paywall is going from strength to strength and has broken through a significant barrier. Read More »

The New York Times put out a press release yesterday, the big headline of which was that it has recorded a slight rise in the print circulation of the paper’s Sunday edition, but the real story was that its total digital subscriptions are on the up. Read More »

While it was reported earlier this week that News International had ditched the idea of a paywall for The Sun other parts of the News Corporation empire are pressing ahead with plans.

The Australian will put its paywall live on Monday, according to News Limited boss John Hartigan, beginning with a three month free trial. Read More »

I wrote earlier this year that News International was rethinking its anti-social media paywall policy with regards whether it would introduce a paywall for the Sun modelled on the one employed by The Times.

It had intially been reported that The Sun would follow in the footsteps of the News of the World, which saw its traffic plummet after its paywall went live, but that turned out to be the least of its problems. Read More »

Other than the aggregation engine that is the Huffington Post few online only sites have managed to achieve mass market success and now Slate, one of the oldest online only magazines, has swung the axe and cut some of its most high profile staff.

Coming on the day when yet another newspaper announced it was putting up a paywall, this time the Newsquest-owned Herald in Scotland, is that another nail in the coffin of free web content? Read More »

Here’s a question: is the web up to the task of delivering news? I’m pretty sure I’m not a lone in finding some news websites a pain to visit. Sure there is often good content, but often how you get it to, how it is presented and what surrounds it can let it and the site down.

US designer Andy Rutledge has been spending a good deal of time thinking about the design of digital media beginning with the thought that “digital news” is broken and needs to be re-examined. Read More »

Its too early to draw any conclusions, but the The New York Times, which introduced its paywall on March 28, seems to be doing well with paying subscribers.

It has racked up around 224,000 digital subscribers as of the end of the second quarter proving that its readers aren’t running for the free content hills beyond its paywall. Read More »