Behind the Scenes

I won’t pay.

I can’t afford it.

I might pay if the price is right.

You’re making a mistake.

I’m sorry I won’t be able to read all your great content online anymore.

Reactions to the fact that edweek.org soon will charge a fee for online premium content span the spectrum from those who think we’re nuts to those who think we’re doing what we have to.

Naturally, a lot of the comments related to price:

· I've been frequenting this site for a while and I've found its articles to be very informative. Although I have never, ever joined a site that requires a pay subscription, I may consider it for edweek.org, as long as the price is reasonable for me.

· I just recently accessed EdWeek.org and am sorry to find out it won't be free anymore, but totally understand the rationale behind the decision to switch to subscription. I'll probably subscribe to on-line only.

Several of our readers have suggested that a reasonable price for an online-only subscription is $29.95, compared to our price of $69.94.

· I have access to the print version at no expense to myself, but prefer to read your content online. I understand Education Week's need to sustain itself financially and want it to do so. So I would pay for access to online content, but I agree with the others who think $69 is over the top. I think $29.95 is more reasonable, and more competitive.

· I am an assistant principal. I read the online version often. I agree that $69.0 is a lot and by the way, I don't have access to purchase orders.

But not everyone thought that $69 is out of line:

· I think the price of $69 per year is a great price even for the online version. EdWeek is by far the most comprehensive ed publication out there. For those people who value their work in public education an annual price of $69 is not asking too much. You get a lot more in return in the way of knowledge that would be useful to run your schools and programs better.

We’ve had several requests for Education Week newspaper subscribers to get free online access, which we are providing.

· … please, keep your policy of letting those subscribers to your printed version also have access to the online version.

We also are selling site licenses with which schools or school districts, for example, could purchase access for multiple uses, up to at least 500.

Several comments have made us think about offering additional pricing options:

· I have been a long time subscriber to EW; at least 15 years. Despite the fact that I am an administrator, I have always paid for my own subscription, because I wanted my own, on time news about what was happening in education without having to wait for someone else to finish reading it first. I am retiring from education at the end of this month and will, most assuredly continue my subscription. Print is more important to me than an on-line copy, although the latter has provided a quick read when I needed it. Your scale makes sense - what no discount for "retirees?" Go for it!

· Do consider a greatly reduced fee subscription for retirees. My pension and part-time work income are stretched far enough now.

Here’s a summary of our current pricing plans:

Print + online (annual) -- readers that wish to receive Education Week in print will also have full access to edweek.org. $79.94 per year.

Online only (annual) -- for readers that only want access to edweek.org and do not want a print subscription to Education Week. $69.94 per year.

Online only (monthly)-- for readers that would like month-to-month access to edweek.org. $9.94 per month.

· The state of public education is in crisis and I strongly feel that keeping Ed Week free is the right thing to do in order to balance out so many ugly things happening to our schools. Everyone has the right to informed and intelligent education news. One day, these little things may add up to a major thing and perhaps it may even wake up the sleeping giant. John Dewey, where are you when we need you?

If we could financially keep edweek.org free, we would, because our mission is to help advance and improve K-12 education. As we’ve said before, we have come to the conclusion that the best way to continue meeting this mission in the years ahead is to have a more financially solid footing. Nonetheless, a lot of our site will continue to be free to registered users.

Our entire Teacher Magazine site will be free, as will the main page of our Research Center and our Agent K-12 job recruitment site. Registered users also will be able to read two premium articles free each week.

As always, we welcome comments and observations.

Gary Kebbel
Interim Executive Producer

Posted by at 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

If you’ve been keeping up with previous installments, you will have read entries from members of edweek.org’s senior management, including our president and publisher, our online executive producer, and our general manager, about how and why we reached the decision to start charging for parts of our site, and the work, research, and general angst that went into making that decision.

I’m here to tell you a bit about how the transition has affected the actual day-to-day production of edweek.org. A view from the trenches, so to speak.

When I started at edweek.org, in 1998, anyone who knew how to write a sentence, had some familiarity with AP style and HTML was pretty much held in awe. Those were the days.

How things have changed.

These days, most news Web operations require some passing familiarity with content management systems, Flash technology, XML, RSS, and a panoply of other initials.

Our world is rapidly changing. The Web team at edweek.org had pretty much been generalists, up until maybe a year or so ago. Any of us could usually do whatever needed doing.

But sensing the changing nature of the online world, I began encouraging my staff to develop specialties, knowing that not all of us could continue to do everything equally well.

So, one became adept at audio production, another at graphic design, and another at Flash.

The first huge change to how we’d been working for the past several years involved how we actually got content online.

With the looming change to a partially subscription-based site, we knew we wanted to offer more value to our online readers. To that end, we decided on several outcomes: 1) Offer daily original content, not just weekly; 2) increase interactivity; 3) enhance our content with video and audio, and 4) offer content in different formats, as dictated by our readers. To meet these objectives, we needed a full-blown content management system.

We spent close to six months refining what we required from such a system, then let the consultants (Really Strategies) loose to come back with recommendations, finally settling on an open-source system called Bricolage.

Learning how to tame Bricolage was a whole new ballgame for the five of us on the Web team. We were all very used to being hands-on, knowing how to fix stuff when it broke, used to hand-coding, and hand-manipulating files as needed. That all had to change as we gave up some very real control over presentation and learned to work with a templating system.

I mentioned consultants. For years we had relied on a part-time contractor to help us with our programming needs, which were never sufficient enough to justify hiring someone full time. Now, in addition to using consultants to help us map out the change to a three-tiered site, we soon realized that Bricolage, written in Perl and HTLM:Mason, was going to need a full-time programmer.

So our first addition to the Web team was a talented fellow (you'll read his entry in future weeks) with a media background who could plumb the depths of this system and get it to do what we needed.

We also changed the titles of the Web team members. From “online editors,” we all became some variant of “online producers.” It’s a subtle change, and in the online world, titles are somewhat amorphous. But we wanted to signal that these positions would be less editorial and more production-oriented.

The next big change for us involved how we related to the print world of EdWeek.

For years the Web team had been included in weekly print editorial budget meetings, but more as silent partners. That began changing last year as we made the conscious decision to start slowly directing our print readers’ attention online. For instance, edweek.org got its own place in the print table of contents each week, a first for us, where we could alert readers to what’s new this week online, and actively push print readers there.

The next big change came with designating two editors to serve as liaisons to our two flagship print publications Teacher Magazine and Education Week. We christened these two folks “Web Assistant Managing Editors.” The EdWeek Web AME came from a strong editorial background, and had been a print editor at EdWeek for five years. The Teacher Web AME, who is also responsible for generating content for our jobs site, Agent K-12, is a long-time member of the Web staff, a talented editor and writer with a ready understanding of what was needed.

They're still working out their exact job descriptions. Loosely, their jobs consist of being on the lookout for education stories that shouldn’t wait for the print edition, in the case of Education Week, and in the case of Teacher Magazine, a monthly, to come up with features that will keep that site alive with fresh and frequent online-only content. More broadly, they’re responsible for thinking through such things as topics for blogs, guests for live chats, how best to work with reporters and editors to ferret out stories, new ideas for e-newsletters or other ways of delivering content, and new features for our sites.

We’ve come a long way since I started as part of an online staff of three here, hammering out pages of html code. And we know we’ve got a long way to go. We’re working around the clock trying to implement the million-and-one great ideas we have to make edweek.org not just good, or better, but the best of breed.

Please leave a comment; we welcome your thoughts.

Jeanne McCann
Director of New Media
Edweek.org
http://www.edweek.org

Posted by at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The decision to create a hybrid model in which a subscription fee would be charged for premium content on edweek.org has seemed like the right move for us for a little while now. Not that there haven’t been unknowns, of course, or that we haven’t felt some sense of risk, but that always comes with change and running any kind of enterprise, doesn’t it?

More than a few years ago it became clear that a small, but growing, number of Education Week print subscribers either preferred to read our articles online, or were willing to read them online because, unlike our print edition, we were not charging for online content. Some former print readers outright told us that they used to subscribe in print, but that free online access convinced them to let their subscriptions lapse. And we began to see some slippage in our renewal rates, which of course was a concern since our renewing subscribers really help support our work at Education Week.

As we were witnessing these changes in our business, we were seeing more and more evidence of people paying for online content, especially for professional or business information, which was really encouraging. And last but not least, I know many of us at Education Week believe that we should make our information available in whatever format the reader wants it (the idea of being medium agnostic). It’s not the format that determines value but the information itself--so why give away valuable information online? Sure, we did it in the early years of edweek.org while we were trying to figure out the Web and while we were building an online presence, but that didn’t mean we needed to keep giving it away (or that we could afford to!).

I think being able to extend the Education Week brand on edweek.org also gives us an advantage. K-12 educators who know us, trust us to get the real story and report it accurately, and we believe that the value they’ve always gotten in print will translate online when we begin asking for payment. We do recognize, though, that some edweek.org visitors don’t know Education Week and that’s one of the reasons we wanted to continue to offer some of our content at no charge, largely in our registered tier. Although great copy and a smart offer can do a lot to attract a subscriber, there’s still nothing like being able to offer the visitor the chance to sample your information to give them a sense of your work and its value.

I want to jump in and say that as clear as all this seems to me right now, it’s really become a more comfortable decision over time. Also, the idea of charging for some online content was informed a little bit by some positive experiences we had with our print and online recruitment franchises.

For many years we sold job ads in Education Week’s print edition, and it’s been an excellent business. Our pages were (and still are) a natural place to find high-quality educators. About four or so years ago we started placing print ads online at no additional charge, just a very basic listing. We then got up the nerve to begin asking our recruiters to give us $99 to post their ad online as part of a forced buy (you couldn’t just buy an online ad). It went amazingly well! We then started selling online enhancements like Top Jobs, and that was also a big winner. We eventually got to the point of launching a robust job site, and took the ultimate leap of faith by uncoupling the print buy from online job postings, which so far has been a good move for us and for our recruiters. We’re trying again to be medium agnostic by allowing recruiters to tap in to our community of educators however they like–print, or online, or both. There are good reasons for a recruiter to purchase both a print and an online ad (like greater total audience), just like there are good reasons for someone to consider a print subscription to Education Week, which also includes premium access to edweek.org. But if it’s just online that you want, we’re happy to sell it to you.

From the beginning of our paid content planning, we wanted subscribers to our print newspaper to automatically get full access to all the online content on edweek.org. We didn’t want to charge extra for online access to folks who were already paying us for a print subscription. But we did want to offer an online-only subscription. We wanted to offer our readers the opportunity to get Education Week content however they wanted, wherever they wanted. If they only wanted online access, we didn’t want to force them into a mode–print–that they weren’t interested in. Sure, a forced print buy could increase our ABC circulation numbers, but those numbers would then obviously not accurately reflect true readership of the Education Week print edition.

I’m proud of us for recognizing that an online-only subscription would help provide our readers what they want, and that we didn’t force all of our online users to take a newspaper subscription so that we could artificially increase our print circulation numbers. We hope this decision will prove to be a good business decision for us on lots of levels.

On the subject of page views, we know that adding a third tier or a subscription “wall” will decrease our page views, at least in the short term. We definitely took a hit on page views when we introduced registration on edweek.org, although they mostly recovered. We think about this because we, like most online sites, are continuing to generate more revenue from online advertising. We believe that some of the normal decline in page views will be mitigated by our registered tier, where visitors can access some new content each week. Basically, we’re looking at the total revenue and readership picture, and we’re not expecting or even wanting advertisers to continue to be the sole support of edweek.org. Some of that support needs to come from the reader.

We’ve significantly focused on and invested in edweek.org for the past several years with some real successes, and we’re poised to take the next big step, the introduction of our paid content model. I’m excited, and truth be told, a little bit nervous, but I think that’s OK.

—Michele Givens
General Manager
Editorial Projects in Education,
publisher of
www.edweek.org
Education Week and
Teacher Magazine