The poll is multiple choice, select as many as you feel are appropriate in your instance.
Feel free to leave comments below in the comment section if I left out an option which best describes you.
Poll- Since the Gloucester Daily Times Went Paywall- How Has It Influenced Your Viewership?
Feel free to leave comments below in the comment section if I left out an option which best describes you.
Good Morning Gloucester 
I fall in the James Dowd category…my opinion of the GDT was not good before, but now they have figured how to make my opinion of them worse, BUT I have figured how to beat them at their game,,,too bad, Ray and company…haha…sorry Joey but you didn’t give me this option in your poll…If they fail,they have no one to blame but themselves…they don’t know how to evolve…smarter people than me have observed that this kind of thinking is equal to building bigger candles rather than inventing electric lights…the Phoenix will rise if they fail…don’t fret…
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I have to be brutally honest here. I have so many existing monthly fees competing for my dollar that it have to be a nominal monthly fee (like $2) for me to subscribe.
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I agree wholeheartedly with Toby Pett and James Dowd. I bet if you erase your cookies, you can continue to read articles. Works with the NYT, don’t see why it wouldn’t with the GDT. Essentially, it’s a lousy paper. The reporting is biased and they seem to think they know what’s best for us in terms of the news they choose to report. And, as a lifelong grammar cop, I catch way too many errors.
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I have to side with Toby here – the GD Times was always a “not ready for prime time” publication anyway; charging money to access the news (and the tons of ads) is a bit over the top. They were a pay site several years ago, with password access if you paid for it. They opted to go to a free site after that, but apparently now want to go back to charging for it. Truth be told, the ONLY thing I look at are the obituaries, and there are other places to get that info, so I’m not really impacted that much by the change.
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Their readership will decline and their advertisers will pull back…………..bottom line, they will lose $.
Also, as someone has already pointed out, it ain’t hard to “beat” the new system.
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I would have more patience for this kind of maneuver if it were 1998. As Joey and I discussed in the GMG podcast, a ton of otherwise viable businesses crashed and burned because they understandably couldn’t continue to give their product away, but at the same time paywalls just don’t work as the poll above reflects. AOL got millions of people online, but now only my elderly aunt still uses it (she also still likes to clip out articles and send them to us). Here in modern times if you are going to put up a paywall you’d better be 1. Offering something enhanced from the basic free version consumers are used to, not just an ad-free experience or 2. Providing some kind of massive savings like Spotify where you can rightfully argue that $10 a month is less than you would have spent on CDs if you are a music fan. Eagle Tribune just went and slapped the paywall up on the existing site at the internet- outrageous cost of $15 a month. It makes one wonder if they talked to anyone in the online media space before doing this. Maybe there is some thinking around this I’m just not seeing, but if the plan was to exclude younger, richer, more educated and technically savvy readers for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, then Huzzah. Well done.
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Ditto
No true Investivgative journalism;
No subscriptions from me.
It easy to talk about drugs. Its the meat and potatoes of “the force”
It needs to explore the Gloucester juggernaut of funding.
While ployees of the city see their wages “not”
In par with other cities. I believe many will come back to Gloucester for less $$
To get more quality of life
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I figured the GD Times would resort to this. I’m not going to pay it when I’m used to getting it for “free”. Not gonna happen.
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GD Times…WSJ….hmmmm where shall I spend my journalism dollar? I do budget what I spend on..so had to assess the value to me. Didn’t take long to sort that out.
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Thanks for asking this poll, Joey. My family and I have subscribed to the Gloucester Daily Times for 10 years and will continue to do so because it strengthens our ties to our neighbors and our community. We don’t find photos of friends’ kids in the Wall Street Journal. I didn’t read about how my friend Scott Memhard’s Cape Pond Ice business was saved in the New York Times. I didn’t learn about Peter Bell’s quietly wonderful life in the Atlantic. When there’s a quirky local arrest on Main Street, I can’t read about it in the Economist and then talk with my friend the cop at the kids’ bus stop it about it the next day. I can’t read those news stories in those publications because they’re not there. The GDT contributes to Gloucester’s sense of place. There aren’t many communities of 28,000 people that still I have a local daily paper that brings us together, gives us something to talk about, shows us what’s going on the city and neighborhoods around us and gives us common ground. Just like there aren’t many places like Gloucester. The Gloucester Daily Times is one more thing that brings us together as a community. We’ll continue to subscribe to the GDT and root for its continued success.
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I, too, am a faithful reader of the Gloucester Daily Times and for many of the same reasons stated by John McElhenny above. Although we don’t subscribe, my husband picks up the paper at Tony’s every morning by 7 AM and drops it back to the house for me before he goes for coffee. I love following my grandchildren’s and my former students’ successes – Dean’s List, President’s List, Honor Roll, athletic accomplishments, parts in school plays, music and theater roles, graduations, etc. I am kept abreast of programs and fundraisers being held for our various Cape Ann Churches, schools, and organizations, local theater presentations, senior center activities, and the YMCA.. The Gloucester Daily Times strengthens us as a community and helps us celebrate all that makes Cape Ann a wonderful place to live and raise our families.
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I get the paper version. It’s an old habit. It goes well with my morning coffee and the mist on my porch. I learned long ago not to believe what I read when they reported on meetings I had attended and I wondered “Were they at the same meeting I was at?” Back when the comments were anonymous (maybe they still are? I don’t go there) it was really a sad place online and I never went back. Maybe they need the online aspect to stay “hip and with it” but the only people I know who regularly checked the online version were locals who moved out of town. Now THERE’S a group who might be upset. They’ll just have to switch to more fun-loving, informative, GMG! The Obits might be difficult… oh well, they’ll have to do something really radical like communicate with their old friends!
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