Only 35 Subscribers to Newsday’s Paid Website After Three Months

The big news recently was that the New York Times let it be known that in the future it’s website will llikely be a paid website. No more news freebies for Internet surfers. The wave of the future?

If Newsday’s experience is any indication, then it won’t put food on the Times’ owners’ table, although it might buy a few cups of coffee at Starbucks:

In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in media circles it has been followed with interest. Could its fate be a sign of what others, including The New York Times, might expect?

So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.

That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn’t know the number off the top of his head, so he asked a deputy sitting near him. He replied 35.

Michael Amon, a social services reporter, asked for clarification.

“I heard you say 35 people,” he said, from Newsday’s auditorium in Melville. “Is that number correct?”

Mr. Jimenez nodded.

Of course, to a certain extent comparing Newsday and the Times is like comparing apples and oranges. But the basic problem for newspapers (and news magazines) as they try to come up with a more lucrative model in the 21st century amid the print media’s rapid atrophy is how to make Internet sites pay when people get so much stuff for free elsewhere. Unless people absolutely MUST have their fix of Maureen Dowd or NYT editorials, quite a few readers who don’t want to spend money on the NY Times during the recession could be expected to seek actual news from other sites such as the Washington Post, see what’s for free on Google News or even (perish the thought!) rely totally on weblogs (such as this one) for their news fixes.

Until and unless a larger number of infooutlets are using the same model, a good chunk of the readership could well shrug and just find another spot to surf.

For free.

Here’s a roundup of how newspapers that charge for paid content are doing.