Behind the Scenes

In 1996, "American Education’s Newspaper of Record" entered the Internet age when it launched its Web site, edweek.org. While not at the absolute cutting edge, Education Week’s site was, nonetheless, among the first journalistic offerings on the Web.

The site – published by the nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education – quickly became a resource for policymakers, school administrators, teachers, parents, advocates, education journalists, and researchers.

For the first few years after its launch, we took great pride in edweek.org just as it was. Administrators and teachers told us it was great. Reporters from other media outlets called it an invaluable resource for ferreting out the facts about schools and learning. Researchers, policymakers, and advocates viewed it as a collection point for data and an online crossroads for lively discussions and debates.

There was bad news, though. Like virtually every other national newspaper, Education Week watched its print subscriptions steadily drop as an increasing number of people accessed the newspaper, its archives, and its research for free online.

And, so, the internal debate began. Should we keep the site free for all? Or, would doing so drain EPE to a dangerous point? After considerable research and soul-searching, we came to the conclusion that edweek.org must restrict access to some of its online resources to paying subscribers, if the Web site and the overall operation are to continue to thrive. It was a tough decision, but the only one that made sense.

The transition to a partly subscriber-only site is not something that happens overnight. In fact, we’ve been building up to this reconfiguration for several years, first with extensive planning, then by requiring registration to access most of the site’s content, and next with an extensive overhaul of edweek.org that wrapped up last fall.

After instituting registration in February 2003, we gleaned a much greater understanding of who was visiting edweek.org and what content they were accessing. Let me share some key statistics and research that informed our decisions: By the fall of 2003, nearly 200,000 people had registered to use the site, and an average of 1.6 million page views were being logged each month.

What we learned (and this was somewhat unexpected) was that a large percentage of the site’s registered users were teachers (34 percent), students (16 percent), and parents (5 percent). In other words, the majority of registered users were not from what we would consider the traditional audience for Education Week.

At the same time, we also learned that the newspaper’s traditional audience of administrators, policymakers, and marketers were the "power users" of the site. They visited more often and viewed more pages during each visit than teachers, parents, and students.

Just as important, of course, is what we learned about the content they were accessing. In a nutshell, we learned that more traditional audience was coming to the site to read the current weekly issue and daily news compendia, use the archives, and access the newspaper’s special reports. Teachers, students, and parents, meanwhile, were more likely to tap into the site’s Issues Pages and other topic-specific content.

In the end, then, we decided to segment the site and the audience as the data had informed us made sense. The redesigned edweek.org site, unveiled last October, was divided into four sections: Education Week, Teacher Magazine, Research Center, and Agent K-12, an online job-recruitment service.

Keeping key business objectives in mind, the new site was designed to:

• Entice our traditional audience to become paying subscribers by focusing on policy and news and by offering such enhancements in the Education Week section of the site as Web-only content and deep levels of customization and personalization.

• Retain our non-traditional Web audience, many of whom are teachers and students, by providing compelling content – specifically in the Teacher and Research Center sections of the site – that would require only registration, not a paid subscription.

• Leave enough of the site open to encourage visitors to become either a paying subscriber or at least a registered user.
  

In addition to a new organization, the revamped site also includes: a new look, new navigation, improved search capabilities, and a new content-management system to simplify and automate much of the back-end technology. The main idea, of course, was to create a system that allows a single piece of content to be used in multiple ways, such as in e-newsletters, as well as in multiple places within the site.

Even as we seek to increase the value of the subscription-only portions of edweek.org, we believe it’s imperative that the free areas remain useful and engaging. Because we’ve learned that a significant number of our online users are teachers, students, and parents, we intend to keep the Teacher Magazine portion of the site free and open to all. We also plan to beef up the Teacher section with more interactive chats and other Web-only features.

Content on the site’s Research Center section, too, will also remain free and open to all registered users. Popular content in the Research Center includes more than 50 Issues A-Z pages, State Info pages, and Education Counts, an EPE-developed interactive database of hundreds of policy indicators and other quantitative information across the 50 states.

Given demand in the field for research- and data-based decisionmaking, edweek.org’s Research Center seeks to connect policymakers and practitioners with the information they need when
they need it.

So, while the decision to wall off certain sections of the site was not easy, we believe that it is necessary as part of a business strategy to protect the Education Week franchise and to make EPE’s online publishing business self-sustaining.

That said, we will continue to operate edweek.org with EPE’s overall mission in mind: providing the news, context, and perspectives that will ultimately raise the level of discourse in American precollegiate education and lead to lasting school change.

Virginia B. Edwards
President, Editorial Projects in Education
Editor, Education Week and Teacher Magazine
6935 Arlington Road, Suite 100
Bethesda, MD 20814

Posted by at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Last week, Virginia B. Edwards, the publisher of edweek.org, the Web site of Education Week newspaper, Teacher Magazine, an Education Week Research Center, and our Agent K-12 job-search site announced that this fall our Web site will no longer be completely free.

This no doubt will raise a lot of questions in your mind, so we have compiled some answers here, and we will add to these as the summer progresses. Our Web site and our newspaper will update you all summer about the changes that are coming.

In addition to keeping you informed about the changes to come, we want to give you a look at some of our thinking and want to explain why we are making this change. We encourage your comments, thoughts and reaction in exchange. That's what this blog is about: Our opportunity to comment back and forth with one another as we get closer to requiring a subscription to access most content on edweek.org.

We know this change is not without its risks. And we know there is no one roadmap to accomplish this. That's why were here talking about it.

Our publisher is allowing us to be a transparent, ongoing case study for taking a newspaper Web site from free to subscription.

I suspect many of you are asking yourselves why are we doing this? The letter from our publisher, Ms. Edwards, (linked to above) starts to answer this question, and she will write more on this blog about her reasoning and her goals.

Here are some of the questions that sent us down this path: How do we build the value of our Web site, invest in its growth, preserve the value of the newspaper, properly value our content, and stop the drift of paying subscribers to the free Web site?

And here's our dilemma: If all of our content remains on a free Web site, and if subscribers who used to pay for Education Week newspaper, drop their subscription in favor of reading the news free on the Web, then the long-term inevitability is that there won't be enough money to keep paying the reporters and editors to publish Education Week newspaper or this site.

The latest research makes this problem clear: Nielsen/NetRatings, a television and Web site ratings company, reported last week that 21 percent of online users who also read newspapers, now prefer to read newspaper articles online. Mostly, that means they are turning from a product for which they have to pay, to one where they don't. To say the least, that's not a business model that can succeed in the long run.

For edweek.org's change to requiring a subscription, we plan a three-tiered strategy of free content, registration content, and subscription content. We still have questions, however, about what content should go into each category.

Related to that, here's a problem were working on: Should we put some of our high-traffic pages behind the subscription wall or should they be free—to market our reporting and entice more people to subscribe?

Would keeping a popular page free really get people to subscribe, or is that just theory? If we keep those pages free, would we be giving readers all they want from the site, so they never would subscribe? Or, how many readers would we alienate by taking a popular page and moving it to the subscriber-only section of the site? How do we know (in advance) if the content is enough of a draw to get anyone to subscribe? Would we continue to make more money from the ads on those pages by keeping the really popular content free?

Thankfully, we have a little more information to guide us on this question because our site has required registration for almost two years. That data helped inform our decision-making on this problem. Here's how: Users of our site are asked to select whether they are school administrators, principals, teachers, students, etc. We're now studying the popular pages to see who goes there, with a particular focus on the demographics.

We feel a little safer charging for a popular page that is visited mainly by superintendents and principals than we do if that page is read mainly by teachers and students, because administrators are a significant percentage of our readers, and they probably can expense the cost of the subscription. Seems to us that the second situation means the page should be free to continue to get decent ad revenue from a demographic that very likely would not subscribe. Losing the teachers and students could mean losing our future audience.

So that's our Lesson #1: Switching to subscription is like flying blind if you don't first set up registration and gather demographic data on your users.

We will update at least weekly with major topics such as how we have changed our advertising pricing and sales tactics, how are we changing our budget projections, and what we are doing about the first-time visitor who comes to us through a search engine. But we also will have regular, shorter updates with our problem of the moment—ones we probably haven't thought about, yet. You will hear from our publisher, general manager, circulation director and others.

The next major update will explain why in the heck we are making this change. Our publisher will share the data that made her believe this is the right move for edweek.org.

We know we will benefit from a wider discussion of our ideas, and we hope you use the comment feature of this blog to let us and everyone else—know what you think. You also can send us your comments at comments@epe.org.

Another version of this blog, designed to explain the change to editors, is available at The Media Center, at the American Press Institute. We thank The Media Center for helping us contribute our experiences to the questions many editors will have to face.

Note about the author: Gary Kebbel is interim executive producer of edweek.org.

Posted by at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)