CNN and Reuters Move News Behind Paywalls

CNN and Reuters are joining other digital news platforms in setting up paywalls to increase revenue.

CNN began asking some of its readers to pay $3.99 per month to gain access to its reporting Tuesday (Oct. 1). It will push for subscriptions after users have read a certain number of free articles a month.

“Starting today, we are asking users in the United States to pay a small recurring fee for unlimited access to CNN.com’s world-class articles,” Alex MacCallum, executive vice president of digital products and services at CNN, said in the report.

CNN’s subscription push is a bid to strengthen its digital business, per the report.

The move comes as CNN CEO Mark Thompson plans to pivot the company away from being a television-focused organization to a multi-platform news company, Reuters reported Tuesday.

Reuters, for its part, made a similar decision, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The global news organization is set to begin charging readers who visit its news site and apps a $1 per week subscription fee. The fee will launch this month in Canada and expand later to the United States and parts of Europe.

The Verge is also considering a paid subscription, per the report, which cited an unnamed source.

Reuters plans to use the subscription revenue to expand its coverage and ultimately its consumer-facing business, Reuters President Paul Bascobert said in the report.

The New York Times is an example of a news organization that has successfully built a paywall. The company added 100,000 digital-only subscribers to its readership in the second quarter of 2018 for a total of 3 million digital subscribers at the time. In August, it reported 10.8 million subscribers, with 10.2 million of them being digital only.

In June, the company mulled putting its most popular podcasts behind paywalls. It considered giving access to new episodes of “Serial” to paid subscribers and allowing nonsubscribers to access only the three most recent episodes of “The Daily.”