MiamiHerald.com to have paywall by year's end

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via Poynter.org:

[The Miami Herald's parent company] McClatchy says it intends “to roll out a metered plan in the third quarter in five of our markets” in its press release about the company’s second-quarter earnings, and it will start charging at the rest of its papers in the fourth quarter.

We will offer readers a combined print and digital subscription package that will include access to web, certain mobile and replica editions for a relatively small increase to print home-delivery rates. We’ll also offer online-only digital subscriptions to users after they read a certain number of pages. Once the first wave is launched, we intend to expand this model to our other markets beginning in the fourth quarter of this year.

There you have it folks...no more free lunches from the Miami Herald. If you want to read their crap first-class journalism; you're going to have to pay.

Note to Herald executives: If you expect me to pay to read your content, I'll expect you to make a few minor tweaks first:

You can start by assigning real reporters to cover the news. I'm not about to pay to read semi-literate crap like this: "Betancourt was assaulted and stricken at the head, enough to crack the front and side of his skull and bruising the brain on the opposite side of the impact."

Re-design the website. What you have now is a complete disaster. And while you're at it, perhaps you can hire someone to come up with a site design that allows photographs to be displayed in a size that doesn't require viewing them with a magnifying glass.

Hire someone who knows how to cover Breaking News. This person obviously has no clue how it's done...so get rid of her. And, I'd like to see more news about Liberty City and Miami Beach and less about Haiti and the Dominican Republic.


Do away with or completely revamp the current story comment system. I'm not about to pay my money to read a constant, never-ending stream of hate speech written by Internet trolls. You don't allow it in the pages of your paper, so why allow it online?

Priorities. Why is it that the paper that once employed Edna Buchanan no longer has a full-time, experienced reporter covering the cops? But that same paper still has a full-time dance critic?

And finally....