Slovakia’s media goes behind a paywall — all of it

Under a new initiative called Project Piano, virtually all of Slovakia’s online media is going behind a paywall, the Guardian reports: Nine major news organisations – including three broadsheet newspapers, a tabloid, two magazines and a television station – have banded together to charge a single subscription fee for access to their content. Launched yesterday, ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

Under a new initiative called Project Piano, virtually all of Slovakia's online media is going behind a paywall, the Guardian reports:

Under a new initiative called Project Piano, virtually all of Slovakia’s online media is going behind a paywall, the Guardian reports:

Nine major news organisations – including three broadsheet newspapers, a tabloid, two magazines and a television station – have banded together to charge a single subscription fee for access to their content.

Launched yesterday, Project Piano will be free for the next two weeks. But after that, users will pay about 87p a week or £2.54 a month to read, view and listen to material provided by some of the country’s main news organisations.

They include Slovakia’s oldest daily Pravda, its leading broadsheet SME, the business paper Hospodarske noviny, sports title Dennik Sport, weekly magazine Tyzden, media business site Medialne.sk, video portal MeToo.sk, and monthly IT magazine PC Revue.

Piano won’t be getting much love from Boing Boing, but the idea makes a certain amount of sense: put enough of a country’s media behind a paywall that readers can’t stay informed without it, and allow them full access by buying won’t account, rather than a different one for each website.

I don’t know anything about Slovakia’s media ownership laws, but I wonder if a similar scheme in the United States — including say, the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and CNN.com — would fall afoul of antitrust rules.  

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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