Toronto Star launches paywall
Canada’s largest newspaper by circulation goes behind a paywall starting on Tuesday.
The Toronto Star launched a metered paywall on Tuesday, asking online readers to pay if they want to read more than 10 articles a month.
The country’s largest newspaper by circulation announced the details of its Digital Access program in an online video, with publisher John Cruickshank calling it a “major transition.”
“Importantly, subscribers to Digital Access will help us to continue to invest in the high-quality reporting, ground-breaking investigations, opinion writing and digital innovation on which our readers have come to depend,” Cruickshank said in an accompanying article.
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Readers can sign up for unlimited access to content for $9.99 plus tax monthly and will pay only 99 cents for the first month. Print subscribers who are signed up for automatic monthly payment will get Digital Access for free, provided they sign up by Dec. 31, 2013. As of 2014, print subscribers who had not already signed up for Digital Access will pay $4.99 plus tax monthly. Subscribers will also get a PDF “replica edition” of the printed paper delivered daily.
Torstar, the newspaper’s parent company, tested paywalls at some of its other newspapers including the Hamilton Spectator. Last year, the Globe and Mail and Postmedia Network also rolled out their own versions of digital subscriptions.
Tamara Baluja is an award-winning journalist with CBC Vancouver and the 2018 Michener-Deacon fellow for journalism education. She was the associate editor for J-Source from 2013-2014.