UK news group charges readers to view online content

One of the UK's biggest news groups, Johnston Press, has begun charging readers a fee to view content on the websites for six of its titles.

Readers wishing to view content on the six websites will be asked to pay £5 for a three month subscription or otherwise be directed towards buying the paper version of the title. Johnston Press is the first regional publisher in the UK to begin charging readers to view web content. Titles taking part in the trial are, The Worksop Guardian, The Ripley and Heanor News and The Whitby Gazette. Also taking part is The Northumberland Gazette. Taking part in Scotland are two titles, The Carrick Gazette and The Southern Reporter. Another Johnston Press title, The Scotsman, offers a similar system where it charges readers to view "premium content" on it's site. Johnston Press owns more than 300 titles in the UK and has recently suffered a drop in advertising revenues and says that the introduction of "paywalls" is an experiment in seeing the impact of charging for content. The Guardian's director of digital content, Emily Bell, spoke to the BBC, "Once you start restricting access on the websites, if you have content that can broadly be found somewhere else, then you really restrict the number of people coming to websites. I think it's great that people are experimenting with lots of different models because undoubtedly we need to find more money in the market." Charging for web content is not a completely new concept in the UK; the Financial Times charges for full access to its web content. Earlier this month the boss of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, said that he would attempt to block Google from using news content gathered from his companies. He has previously said that the websites of his companies would soon begin charging readers to view the content.