TORONTO — The Globe and Mail will soon move to an online pay-per-view model, the newspaper told employees Thursday as it also asked them to take unpaid leave in moves that will help the newspaper improve its bottom line.
Phillip Crawley said Thursday the newspaper has decided that beginning in the fall, premium content will be shielded behind a paywall.
“I think there is a broader general move towards charging for content,” Crawley said.
“It doesn’t mean that everything is sealed off because it’s a metered paywall, it means that if you go beyond a certain number of stories you want to access you end up paying something for the privilege of doing that.”
Crawley said the paper had already planned to put Report on Business content behind a paywall this fall, but “as we’ve looked further into this, we think it’s right just to take the plunge.”
The Globe spent the past year studying similar strategies at papers like London’s Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.