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Each person who chooses to pay for our product has a relationship with us.
Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, Newspaper subscribers long have been our most valuable customers. Each person who chooses to pay for our product has a relationship with us, and we have an obligation to know what they need and want from us.
In August, we began creating the digital equivalent of that relationship by labeling our best work “Subscriber Exclusive,” and charging for online access, while leaving most of our stories free to readers. It’s a considered business move to serve broad audiences and advertisers that want to reach them, while building a deeper relationship with our most avid online readers.
The two different groups – our free readers and our subscribers – are on my mind every day, and here at the end of the year. Take a look at samples from the top read stories this year among these two groups:
Free on MLive.com: “From hair salons to gyms, experts rank 36 activities by coronavirus risk level” “Ryan Gallager was forced to leave ‘The Voice’ due to breaking COVID protocols” “Police: Wear pants to check the mail – final warning” “Kelly Stafford, wife of Matthew, says she’s ‘over living in a dictatorship’” “Bald eagle attacks state’s $950 drone in U.P., sends it to bottom of Lake Michigan”MLive.com Subscriber Exclusives: “Michigan might be waiting awhile for winter to arrive, major weather models show “Meet the Kalamazoo music whiz kid behind the No. 1 song in the country” “Employees describe ‘chaos,’ fear and tears at Mercy Health in Muskegon ravaged by COVID-19” “As Michigan’s three-week COVID ‘pause’ nears its end, will Whitmer extend it?” “La Nina has strengthened, what this means for U.S. this winter”The lists are pretty different – one contains stories that were considered "viral" and got more than 700,000 reads; the top one was read 1.6 million times. We know from research that a lot of those eyeballs are coming from outside Michigan, sometimes outside the US. But that second list, the list of top read subscriber stories? Well, they share a couple of traits: Most are issues of deep news value to Michigan residents. They are relevant to a specific audience, not a viral audience. And none of them was read more than 35,000 times by our subscriber base.
We’ve come a long way as an industry in the past few years. In the eyeballs/advertisers online model, a story that garnered 1 million page views looked more valuable than one that was read 10,000 times. But as we began to see what loyal subscribers value, and are willing to pay for, we were able to justify putting more resources behind our public interest reporting, our enterprise reporting, our data-based reporting.
This proved critical in 2020, as we were confronted with covering the unprecedented triad of COVID, civil rights advocacy and unrest, and the election. Thousands of you signed on as subscribers to not only get access to this coverage, but also to keep it coming.
We’re learning as we go, but one thing we know is that we are not going back. As the newspaper-reading generation continues to get smaller, we need to grow the same kind of loyal, committed relationship with online readers who count on us to deliver the trusted information they need.
To the dedicated subscribers who are paying each month to support our journalism, everyone here at MLive wants to say “Thank you. You make us better every day.” To those of you still reading us for free, I want to thank you, too. By reading us frequently you are helping our advertisers reach you. But to you free readers, I'd like to ask you for a favor in 2021: Consider subscribing. I promise it will be the start of a mutually rewarding relationship.
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Editor's note: I value your feedback to my columns, story tips and your suggestions on how to improve our coverage. Let me know how MLive helps you, and how we can do better. Please feel free to reach out by emailing me at editor@mlive.com.
John Hiner Executive Editor Vice President of Content Mlive Media Group
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