A couple of weeks ago I popped for a $1 Rockford Register-Star for a “print edition only” article about the Winnebago County Board’s having dropped IMRF pensions for its part-time members.
I couldn’t tell from the paper whether this was a one-time effort to sell papers on the news stand and keep subscribers or a continuing one.
I was back in Belvidere the beginning of last week and have concluded the approach is a method being used to keep people reading the paper.
Will this develop into a trend among newspapers?
I wondered last time how the Rockford paper would have enough good stories to put in the paper, but not on its web site.
Here’s one about home prices from Monday:
The Business Section even has paper-exclusive stories. This one could have been elsewhere. It talks about public employees who were hired during the eight months after the pension reform bill creating a lower level of pensions, but before the law took effect.
The detail is fascinating:
One problem I see with this approach is that people may not know what they are missing.
To see what the Register-Star is doing about that, I went to its web site and found the following promotion of an article to be in Wednesday’s paper:
The obvious question is whether the Northwest Herald and Daily Herald will follow Rockford’s example and, if they do, what will happen to circulation.