A little while ago I saw this lengthy and occasional inside-baseball Q&A with Dallas Morning News publisher Jim Moroney in which he insists that life behind the pay wall's just fine, thanks for asking. Sorry -- that's "subscriber content initiative." Anyway. Says Moroney, since the pay wall was erected a few months ago, 65 thou paper-takers have "authenticated through a registration process in order to access our content through our digital platforms," and far as he's concerned, that's good news for The News:
The doomsayers cry out, "But your page views will drop!" Our response: How valuable are pages that you're selling at 70 cents per thousand? I'm not worried about the loss of page views that are sold at remnant rates. There's very little financial value there. We expected a 40 percent decline in page views, but in the first 12 weeks the average weekly decline was only 19 percent. That's less than the percent of our page views we were selling at remnant rates.Here's another big change for Dallas's Only Daily: It's going to start running same-sex marriages in the Weddings section beginning immediately, per the Dallas Voice. Maybe you recall: Back in November, local couple Mark Reed and Dante Walkup filed a formal discrimination complaint with the city against the daily when it stuck their announcement in the Commitments section, which was not what the couple had asked -- or paid -- for. But Moroney and editor Bob Mong met with the couple yesterday and decided that rather than keep fighting it, they're giving in:
"When you do the right thing, you just do the right thing," Moroney said. "I believe that publishing same-sex marriages performed in states where they are legally allowed, that publishing those under the Weddings heading in our newspaper, is the right thing to do."
