The Chronicle-Telegram offers unlimited digital access subscriptions

Starting Monday, our website, chroniclet.com, will limit readers to five free stories per month.After readers reach the limit, they will get digital access to our content only if they are subscribers. Our introductory price for a three-month digital subscription is 99 cents. Beyond that, a continuing digital subscription can be purchased for $11.25 per month.Regular readers of my Sunday column know that we've been preparing to charge for access to our website, although they might have begun to wonder whether it would ever happen. I have been predicting it at least since 2017, but we needed more time than I expected to get the technology right.Then, when we were about to launch it, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and we delayed some more.We understand that our timing is less than perfect, especially for those who've lost jobs or are enduring pay cuts as part of the economic downturn accompanying efforts to contain the coronavirus.Our publishing company has been affected, too, because advertising revenue has slumped. Advertisers, many of whose businesses also are struggling during the pandemic, understandably have cut back their spending with us.On top of that many of the events we usually cover, from government meetings to sports contests to entertainment happenings, have been canceled.To cope with the changed circumstances, we've limited the number of pages in the newspaper and temporarily placed all employees on a 32-hour instead of a 40-hour work week. They've continued to put out the paper and update the website, but in fewer hours per person and for less pay. It's an arrangement we can't maintain and, just as important, a service we cannot continue to provide readers, unless we find new sources of revenue. Expense cuts alone won't keep us going.As longtime readers of our newspaper know, we have been raising the price of subscriptions and copies purchased at newsstands. We have done it gradually over several years as advertising has declined as a share of our total revenue. Ads once generated 80 percent of that revenue and payments from readers 20 percent. Within the last year or so, however, reader revenue began outpacing ad revenue.Then the pandemic hit, and ad revenue plunged. Our decision to go ahead now with the pay meter reflects those circumstances but also our determination to keep providing readers the crucial information they need during these harrowing times. Their interest has proved intense, with our weekly website traffic running at twice the level of any single week in the past three years.I hope we've earned readers' trust over many years of reporting the local news accurately, fairly and completely and providing state, national and international news through a variety of wire services. We also provide commentary on local news on our opinion pages as a well as a range of political views from our stable of syndicated columnists.I know that trust has to be re-earned every day, and we strive to do that, whatever the circumstances. We know just how valuable to readers our accuracy, enterprise and insistence on accountability from government are, especially in a crisis.We can't keep it up, though, as a free service on the web. Newspapers' instinct early in the internet age was to offer their coverage free online, as an inducement to readers to subscribe to print editions. The idea never made good business sense, which became ever clearer as more and more readers began to rely on the internet for their news.News doesn't generate itself, however. Reporters have to chase it down, and editors have to shape it, place it on pages and the website, and write headlines for it.That's not all, either. Pages have to be produced daily such that ads the sales staff has sold get created and placed appropriately.To that point, much is the same for print and web, but the newspaper, unlike the website, comes off a press. Which helps explain why a newspaper subscription is priced higher than a digital subscription. Newsprint, the raw paper fed into the press, is any newspaper's second highest expense beyond personnel.Then preprinted ads have to be inserted into the paper, and it must be delivered.Online delivery is electronic, thus less expensive. Our digital subscription, at $11.25 a month (or $135 for a full year), costs roughly half the price of a print subscription.Right now, a digital subscription covers access to a digital replica of the newspaper — we call it the E-edition, and it includes a full year's archive — as well as news alerts and newsletters that readers can elect to receive. Beginning Monday, readers will need a digital subscription to retain unlimited access to the website.Print readers should note, however, that their subscription entitles them to access to the website, the E-edition, news alerts and newsletters, at no extra charge. They can activate their access to digital content by visiting the website.Our introductory price for the digital subscription, 99 cents for three months, is designed as an enticement to try it, of course, but it also works well as an affordable price in a time of economic uncertainty.Our hope is that three months from now the economy will be at least on the mend, if not as robust as it was before the virus struck.Whatever the future holds, though, we want readers to know we're determined to do our damnedest to document it.Andy Young is editor emeritus of The Chronicle-Telegram. Contact him at (440) 329-7111 or young@chroniclet.com.