Following in the steps of The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Packer Insider, local newspapers are increasingly offering premium online packages for sports fans, with mixed results.
Following in the steps of The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Packer Insider, local newspapers are increasingly offering premium online packages for sports fans, with mixed results.
Since 2001, Packer Insider has sold more than 40,000 subscriptions, which cost $5.95 per month or $34.95 annually, and is profitable, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Most of the efforts have focused on NFL teams: sites have been launched by newspapers for the Dallas Cowboys, Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, Miami Dolphins, Atlanta Falcons and Pittsburgh Steelers. They generally feature audio clips of postgame press conferences, live chats, exclusive commentary and archives of game stories stretching back decades. In the past year, two papers in the South have also tried to sell college sports content, and one Texas paper tested a service that sends high-school football scores to cellphones, WSJ says.
The Dallas Morning News’s CowboysPlus.com has signed up
several thousand paying subscribers since its launch in summer 2003.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a subscriber-only portion of its sports section, ajcsportsplus. The daily charges $29.95 per year for it and print subscribers p
The Denver Post charged $10 annually for some Denver Broncos content everal
years ago, but discontinued it soon after when “nobody signed up,” says Howard Saltz, new media editor at the paper. ay only $15.
The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel started charging for columns and other features about the University of Tennessee’s football and basketball teams, and has sold more than 3,000 subscriptions. But traffic to the newspaper’s free Tennessee Volunteers site, Govols.com, declined by 25% after the subscription site started.
