TVNewsCheck To Introduce Premium Content

A message from Kathy Haley, TVNewsCheck publisher:

When TVNewsCheck launched on Jan. 26, 2006, my business partner, Harry Jessell, and I had been hearing for months what a brilliant, stupid idea it was.

Broadcasters loved its convenient, comprehensive, continuously updated coverage of their business and, especially, the many trend stories targeted to their needs.

Pundits predicted the industry we covered would be moribund before we turned a profit.

The profits came, while a consolidating broadcasting industry adapted to a second revenue stream in the form of retransmission consent fees and a level of audience fragmentation unimagined in 1982, when the growth of cable began to exert downward pressure on ratings for what were then the Big Three networks.

The industry continues to change and so must we.

TVNewsCheck’s leadership wants to provide more enterprise stories, interviews, survey data and more.

Our current revenue streams — advertising and event sponsorships — while sustaining, don’t allow us to expand our coverage of TV business and finance, programming, journalism, sales, technology, marketing and regulation in the way that we want to. Each month, the budget holds us back.

Premium membership fees will take the shackles off and allow us to provide our audience with more of the news, information, analysis and commentary that will help to propel their businesses forward.

After much consultation with advisers, we have set our premium membership fee at a level — $99 annually — designed to enable many more members than a fee double that size would permit.

What will go behind the premium members-only wall? Executive Session and Tech One-on-One, the long-running TVNewsCheck series of interviews with industry leaders. Trend stories that don’t tend to attract advertising sponsorships and deep dives on emerging issues facing the industry will also go behind the wall.

Breaking news, special reports that have attracted advertising support, coverage of TVNewsCheck events and stories aggregated from around the internet will not go behind the premium members-only wall.

TVNewsCheck‘s AM and PM newsletters and alerts, weekly newsletters Newsroom Tuesday and Tech Thursday — plus the soon-to-be launched Marketing Monday — will also remain available to readers at the free membership level.

And because we are employing a “fremium model” there will be no annoying meter popping up to tell non-members they have only one story left this month.

Loyal readers may remember that we tried to launch a membership model several years ago, but a poorly implemented migration to a new Word Press platform prevented us, several times, from realizing that goal.

If you happened to buy a membership during those days, we have a coupon with your name on it.

We look forward to serving our members, our advertisers and sponsors and our wider audience as they meet the challenges that lie ahead.

If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

We thank you, as always, for your support.

It’s easy from there, but if you need help, please don’t hesitate to contact me or Samantha Sparks, our operations manager.