The Irish Times website goes free-to-view

[dduane]

Not long after the online version of the Irish Times newspaper appeared, some years back, it went subscription-only. At 70 Euro per year (or whatever they were charging), it was just too expensive: I stopped reading it.  I get a sense that other people may have had the same reaction, as last year (I think it was) they changed over to some kind of  “premium subscription” model. But that seems not to have worked either.

So now they’ve gone free-to-view. Well, good. And about time. The IT isn’t a bad paper — many Irish people would consider it the “paper of record”, at the top of the local “broadsheet” league — and it’s nice to be able to get at its electronic version again without having to pay through the nose for the privilege.

Meanwhile, the IT’s old gateway page at Ireland.com, which was originally just a front end for the paper, seems to be being retooled as sort of a portal site now. Makes sense: Ireland is something of a brand in and of itself, and wasting the domain name on a site that was never much more than an introduction to the newspaper seems in retrospect pretty silly.

Should be interesting to see how this develops.

Tags: Ireland, Irish+Times, newspaper, news, ireland.com, Ireland, portal, retool