In about a week, approximately 25% of their readership will miss the soothing glow of this orange-and-black layout.
Photo: ocolly.com
The New York Times much-debated pay wall will be launching soon, and so will the Daily O’Collegian’s, a student publication at Oklahoma State University. The daily newspaper will start charging $10 a year to those that visit the website more than three times a month and live outside a 25-mile radius. The move to paid content, a first in the realm of college journalism, comes just after the announcement that College Publisher, a formerly free content-management system used by college newspapers including the Daily Northwestern, may now cost up to $2,000 a year.
The decision to charge a portion of their audience is questionable at best — there’s no guarantee a market exists for the content outside of campus borders, or that content will be unique enough to keep readers from going to rival publications. But nevertheless, the General Manager of the paper, Raymond Catalino, is keeping his hopes humble. “I’m not really doing this for the revenue at this point,” he told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “I’m basically trying to see if it will work.”
