At a Small Weekly, Online News Comes With a Fee

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesSanford Bernstein, general manager of The Rockaway Wave, in his offices earlier this month.

As newspapers large and small struggle to survive financially in an increasingly digitized marketplace, more and more of them are looking for ways to charge their online readers. In New York, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Newsday have, with varying degrees of success, tried paid digital subscriptions.
One much smaller New York newspaper, though, has had a functional pay wall in place since 2003.
The Wave, the city’s third oldest newspaper, has been serving Rockaway Peninsula in Queens since 1893. The last nine of those years, The Wave’s online readers, some of them as far away as Florida, have had to pay to access the weekly paper’s various offerings — including high school sports roundups, a local couple’s account of their trip to Guantánamo and often cantankerous letters to the editor.
The wall is not too high — $20 a year, a price that includes the print paper for Rockaways residents – and the number of subscribers is not enormous: 600, about half of them garnered right away and the rest added gradually. The number is tiny compared with The Wave’s paid print circulation, which the paper says is 11,500 (the paper costs 35 cents on the street, while single-issue access online costs 75 cents).
But the wave is a small newspaper that is not looking to online revenue for its long-term salvation. And over all, The Wave’s general manager, Sanford Bernstein, said he was satisfied with the decision to erect a pay wall.
“I’m very happy that we did that,” Mr. Bernstein said on a recent Friday afternoon from The Wave’s first-floor offices overlooking a strip mall on Rockaway Beach Boulevard.  “If you don’t do it, what you’re saying is your news doesn’t have value. You shouldn’t diminish your news value by giving it out for free.”
Mr. Bernstein said it was not possible to break out figures for strictly pay-wall-produced revenues because some subscriptions combine print and online access.
Not all of The Wave’s articles come with a price tag. The weekly does not charge for online access to archives. “We don’t want to keep people from doing research,” Mr. Bernstein explained.
Stephen Larson, the founder of Our Hometown Inc., the company that puts The Wave and more than 100 other weeklies nationwide online and helps them make money off their digital content, called The Wave’s online rates “ridiculously low.”
But for some local weeklies, the thought of charging for online content seems just as unthinkable as charging for hard copies of the paper.
“In the present mode, we don’t want to charge — we are a free community weekly newspaper,” said Tony Barsamian, publisher and editor of the  Queens Gazette.
“We do charge a subscription rate if you want the newspaper mailed to your home,” Mr. Barsamian said. But, he added, “if the post office didn’t charge, that would be free too.”