I had a nostalgic, vintage sort of day. It started by picking up my father-in-law’s lovely two-door ’86 Mitsubishi Montero. Windows that wind with a hand crank, five-speed manual, little arrow that blinks on with a click when you hit the turn signal stalk, inclinometer ball sunk into the dashboard that tells you, I assume, when you’re about to tip the thing over. We need two cars this weekend for a child/wedding shuttle situation and I drove it home revelling in every human-activated shift.
I pulled into the driveway and checked the mailbox. Inside, a brown flat-pack package, and inside that, a magazine. Real paper, thick and hefty. Smells likes trees and ink. The mag is called Summit Journal and when they launched, a few months after we did, I spent a bunch of time on the phone with their founder trying to impart the various successes we’d enjoyed and mistakes we’d made. So I feel I have a very small part in it. I don’t climb mountains all that often but I can appreciate what goes into making the thing and I love having its beautiful cover on my table, just to look at.
There is a point to this, I swear. It’s not that we’re about to launch a magazine (though I’d love to at some point). It’s that the medium we operate in, which we can broadly classify as The Internet, tends to push media companies relentlessly toward more. Writing for a website feels like feeding an insatiable beast. It will never tire; it will never be sated. This is generally not a good thing for producing high-quality work.
We may not be a print magazine but there are things about that way of working – more measured, more considered, constraints on space and frequency – that make for a much better product. You may have noticed a shift in what we’re writing in the past few weeks. We’re writing less. About 30% less. But the writing is better, because we can spend more time on each story. We aren’t limiting ourselves to a certain number of pieces and we aren’t forcing ourselves to produce for the sake of production, either.
A few weeks ago, we switched from a metered paywall, where every reader gets a certain number of stories before the paywall drops, to what is generally called a premium content model. Some stuff is free – the few commodity news pieces we do, the Daily News post, most of our podcasts – and most (not all) of our best work is behind the paywall.
There are two reasons for this. One, most importantly, is that feedback from members suggested that it wasn’t always obvious what you were getting for your money. If you’re logged in, you never saw the end of that metered paywall, so it all seemed free (even if it wasn’t if you read more than a few stories a month). Now it’s very obvious when you’re behind the wall, so to speak. The little orange “e” on the homepage and “member exclusive” badge on the story itself do that job.
The second reason is we wanted to shift our own thinking around what we produce. With a metered paywall, it’s very difficult to tie any single piece of content, or even a good or bad week of content, with new member signups. We could sort of get away with doing a bit too much volume, a bit too much commodity news, a bit too much stuff that was easy and quick to pull off but which, if we’re honest, wasn’t really worth paying for.
With the new paywall type, we have to produce work you will pay for. We need to write a certain number of stories per week that we can confidently put that little orange member-exclusive “e” on. We ask ourselves every single day, “Is this worth people’s money?”
We removed a lot of the low-impact content we were doing and are dedicating that saved time to the stories we feel you’ll truly love. The approach is a bit nostalgic, vintage even. It feels sort of like we’re making a daily magazine. But then our business model has always been closer to a print magazine – where you sell the thing to actual people who want to read it – than a traditional digital media title, where you just sell eyeballs and clicks and nothing else.
Innovation is crucial, and we’re not scared to move fast and try things here at EC. But sometimes, a drive in an old Montero reminds you that the old ways still work, too.
Did we do a good job with this story?