MELBOURNE, Florida -- Florida Today announced today that its online "open house" has ended and that viewers will now be prompted to buy a subscription to view additional news stories each day.
The change from a free online news paper to a paid subscription model comes on the heels of Florida Today raising its rate for a Sunday newspaper to $3.00.
Meanwhile, BrevardTimes.com has seen rapid growth in its viewers to over 350k per month since its inception less than a year ago.
Florida Today's parent company Gannett Co., Inc., has experienced a loss of advertising revenue ever since the beginning of the 2008 financial collapse.
Gannett had implemented a series of layoffs last year and is in the process of offering buyouts to some senior employees.
Gannett's stock price improved after the round of layoff last year and closed yesterday at $15.61 per share.
Florida Today has been Brevard County's main local news source for over 40 years, covering Titusville, Merritt Island, Kennedy Space Center, Cocoa Beach, Palm Bay, and other Brevard County communities on Florida's Space Coast.
UPDATE: After running with the story at 7 a.m. today and receiving negative comments, Florida Today re-ran the story with comments disabled at 10 a.m. However, you can feel free to leave your comments below, no signup is necessary to comment on Brevard Times.
SECOND UPDATE; It appears the comments on the second article were turned on around noon.
UPDATE: After running with the story at 7 a.m. today and receiving negative comments, Florida Today re-ran the story with comments disabled at 10 a.m. However, you can feel free to leave your comments below, no signup is necessary to comment on Brevard Times.
SECOND UPDATE; It appears the comments on the second article were turned on around noon.
Say Bye Bye to Floriduh Yesterday.
ReplyDeleteI never thought it was a good paper so I can't say I'm sorry to see them go this route. I find it hard to believe they think this action will address lower subscriptions. This is common with management that believes they aren't the issue. Here's an example of that arrogance:
ReplyDelete"After running with the story at 7 a.m. today and receiving negative comments, Florida Today re-ran the story with comments disabled at 10 a.m."
They took an unpopular action and when they got negative response to it they simply shut off the mic.
I read all my news on-line anyway. Never cared for Today newspaper after they made changes a while back. I usually get my news on line from tv stations. It's much more interesting. This move Today paper made should lose them subscribers not add any. The cost of their paper is way out of line for what you get.
ReplyDeleteThank You, BrevardTimes, I'll give you a go, ;)
ReplyDeleteFloridatoday.com is so littered with advertisments, the website is slow, clunky, and invasive - loads a ton of cookies on your computer. FYI...if you get to your limit of 14 articles, just delete your cookies and it'll start the count all over - not a very smart implementation if you ask me. If you don't want to clear all of your cookies, just delete the current days worth. The specific cookie to delete, it's content starts with s_pers, if you really want to get grainular - took me all of 5 minutes to figure out - just for fun :)
ReplyDeletesomeday they will see that the people don't want to read their PC liberal slant on everything.we have cold blooded killers running around and they wont give a description so you could help the cops if you saw him.
ReplyDelete