If you can’t make money from online articles, why not sell online versions of newspapers? Increasingly, that’s what the regional press is doing: selling exact online replicas of their print editions re-formatted for reading on a PC — some with pointless, tacky page-turning technology. The two latest members of the page-turning club are Tindle Newspapers, which after a trial now offers digital replicas of 40 weekly papers, and the independent Belfast-based Irish News which has ditched its free-to-air site entirely in favour of a paid-for digital newspaper.
But why are publishers so keen on replicating their print products when online publishing can offer readers so much more?
— Tindle charges £1 for two editions of the South London Press all the way up to £33 for a year’s subscription — although there’s a good deal of content available for nothing online. The company claims its Tavistock Times has up to 400 paying readers while the SLP has subscribers in the “high hundreds” (via Guardian.co.uk).
— The Irish News charges the not insignificant sum of £5 a week or £150 a year. In this video, longstanding editor Noel Doran explains the plan is “to provide the full experience of reading the Irish News in print to the online viewer… we think it represents a step forward for our online operation.”
— The independent Congleton Chronicle in Cheshire is also in the page-turning online edition club, with an Exact Editions version costing £25 a year.
— Telegraph Media Group publishes an Exact Editions-made digital version of its weekly world edition The Telegraph, also costing £25 a year.
— And it’s not just newspapers: political weekly The Spectator has a digital edition, made by Exact Editions, costing £67.50 a year.
Is there any point to all this? Tindle claims readers enjoy the format and the project’s success has prompted a further roll-out across the company; people who have left a paper’s circulation area but still want to read the print version will, on this scant evidence, pay for a digital edition. But as anyone who’s worked in print media will tell you, newspapers and magazines are shaped by constraints: lack of time, money, resources, staff and page space all mean printed papers are inherently imperfect products and far less versatile and dynamic than online publishing.
Above all, this displays the undying belief in print media that proprietors still have — whether the next generation of readers will share that belief looks less and less likely every year.

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