The Chronicle, which announced last week that it is in danger of closing, will begin charging for access to some of the content it offers online, according to the Wall Street Journal. The other 15 papers in the Hearst chain will do the same, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which Hearst plans to close as a printed newspaper.
“Exactly how much paid content to hold back from our free sites will be a judgment call made daily by our management, whose mission should be to run the best free Web sites in our markets without compromising our ability to get a fair price from consumers for the expensive, unique reporting and writing that we produce each day,” Steven Swartz, the president of Hearst newspapers, said in a staff memo.
Swartz’s memo also suggests that there will be more subscription and single-copy price increases at the Chron and other Hearst papers: “Our print subscribers don’t pay us enough today that we can say they are actually paying for content. Rather, we only ask readers to pay for a portion of the cost of printing the paper on newsprint and delivering it to the reader’s doorstep.”