#newsrw: why journalists should get to know their customers

Mary Beth Christie (below), head of product management at FT.com, questioned the very term 'paywall': if you book a holiday or buy a pint of milk, she asked, is the product 'behind a paywall'? Well, yes, if you want to call it that. But we don't - so why don't we just talk about paying for newspapers' content, just like everything else?

And she explained the Financial Times' 'metered model', which lures (my word, not her's) readers from free online content to subscription via a registration process which confers some privileged access. So far it's given the site 3 million registered users, and 189,000 paying subscribers. 

But it's not just the subscriptions that make money: information people give when they register helps advertisers to reach the right readers - and that encourages advertisers to spend more.

Joanna Geary (below), community and web development editor at the Times, now also 'behind a paywall' (sorry Mary), talked about how it produces a dialogue with paying customers.

Their payment creates a relationship, and the kind of feelings of loyalty that people used to have towards a newspaper when they talked about how they 'took' the Times.