The owner of the Salt Lake Tribune has announced a plan to make readers register or pay for some content.
Executives of Denver-based MediaNews Group, which owns the Tribune and about 50 other daily newspapers, unveiled plans in a memo to employees Friday. The memo was leaked to a journalism-industry blog Tuesday.
The plan, which Tribune editor Nancy Conway said is in its infancy, calls for charging readers or requiring them to register for "premium content."
"I think when you're talking about 'premium content,' you might be talking about archives," Conway said. "You might be talking about some searchable databases; you might be talking about some specialty features that fit in those categories — not general news necessarily, but news in addition to general news."
The plan also describes two Tribune Web sites planned for the future: a new sltrib.com that would be less cluttered than the current site and would have breaking news, condensed stories from the print paper and user-generated content such as comments on stories; and a local site tuned toward young people with shopping, entertainment, dining, other local guides and probably user-generated content, such as reviews of local plumbers.
The sites would be branded differently but linked to each other, allowing online readers to go back and forth, MediaNews President Jody Lodovic said.
"There's no specific timeline yet," Lodovic said.
A committee is making recommendations for the Web changes, and a timeline will be announced in one to two months.
"We'll probably try it in a market or two before we roll it out company-wide," he said.
The Salt Lake Tribune currently gives away content for free at sltrib.com and on related sites for databases of public information and classified advertising. But MediaNews executives said that is unfair to print subscribers who pay for the paper.
"To be clear, the brand-value proposition to the consumer is that the newspaper is a product, whether in print or online, which must be paid for," the Friday memo said.
Historically, newspapers have made money through paid subscriptions and advertising. But fewer people and companies are subscribing and advertising. The rise of the Internet provides some promise of adding revenue from advertising. However, for now, the gains on the Web side are not making up for the losses on the print side.
"Certainly, right now, news organizations across the country are trying to figure out a new business model," Brigham Young University journalism processor Joel Campbell said. "It doesn't surprise me that MediaNews is looking for ways to generate revenue."
Campbell questions who would be willing to pay for Tribune content. Perhaps researchers, law firms and politicians will pay, he said, but "I'm not sure Joe Blow Consumer is ready to do it."
Some publications, such as Congressional Quarterly in Washington, D.C., charge for content and are profitable. But the key to CQ's success is that its content is unique. People can't get CQ's content anywhere else, and they're willing to pay for it, said Ron Yaros, a professor in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park.
MediaNews must have unique content to be successful, Yaros said.
"There's no guarantee this is going to work," he said. "It's an experiment. In another year or so, we'll have the answer to it."
E-MAIL: lhancock@desnews.com