Belo prepares to test Projo.com pay wall

PROVIDENCE – The Providence Journal’s parent company, A. H. Belo Corp., is preparing to roll out a new system that will require Projo.com readers to pay for some of its stories.

The Journal will soon begin selling an electronic edition that will be an exact digital replica of the newspaper, John McKeon, president and general manager of The Dallas Morning News, A. H. Belo’s largest paper, told investors in a conference call last week.

The introduction of The Journal’s e-edition “will likely involve the limiting of some content on the general free Web site – specifically, unique content of value to people in Rhode Island,” such as local and state stories, McKeon said. Those articles “would only be available through a paid wall on an e-edition,” he said.

McKeon did not say how much the digital edition would cost. A one-year subscription to The Journal’s print edition costs $416, compared with $806 for The Boston Globe or $770 for The New York Times.

Journal articles have been available for free on Projo.com since the site debuted in October 1996, soon after the demise of Rhode Island Horizons, a short-lived online news system The Journal maintained on Prodigy, an early Internet subscription service.

A. H. Belo is moving gingerly on the digital front. The Dallas-based company first disclosed last fall that, like other newspaper publishers, it was exploring ways of charging for the content on its Web sites.

A. H. Belo has not announced plans to offer The Journal or its other papers on Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle or the new iPad tablet computer Apple Inc. will begin selling this month, but Sony Corp. will start selling The Journal on its line of Reader e-book devices this spring. Sony already sells a Reader version of The Morning News for $155 a year or $1 an issue.

Executives at A. H. Belo have criticized the share of revenue Amazon keeps from Kindle subscriptions, saying they would put their content on the new platforms only if doing so was “economically viable.”

McKeon said last week A. H. Belo is “in discussions with other providers” and “looking aggressively at making The Dallas Morning News available on any digital platforms where the economics makes sense and where our readers want to consume it.”

A. H. Belo also introduced a Dallas Morning News iPhone app last August. The company has not created one for The Journal.

There is no charge for the Dallas paper’s app, but there may be one in the future; the app is advertised as “free for a limited time.” The program was developed by Imaginuity Interactive Inc., a Dallas-based software firm.

CEO Robert W. Decherd emphasized that the company was not committed to any specific strategy when it comes to charging for content on its Web sites. He characterized the plan to charge for Projo.com as “a pilot project.”

“We feel like we need to be a follower on this,” Decherd said. “The bigger players – who’ve already announced their intent to put up various forms of either pay walls or gates, depending on how you think about it – are going to set the tone or create some structure around this for the industry.” The New York Times Co. and News Corp. have both announced plans to charge for content.

Decherd added: “The real challenge is … it’s been free for a long time. We have very large traffic through these sites, and we have to create a value proposition that doesn’t alienate our existing users.”

Additional information is available at ahbelo.com.