Nine Publishing brings free news subscriptions to universities
Nine Publishing has announced a new licensing deal with universities, where The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age will be made available for free to its student body.
Campus Access allows students and staff access to a complimentary subscription to the Herald via their university’s portal, which includes news content, personalised subscription access, plus access to the Good Food app.
The University of Sydney is the first institution to sign on, with plans to roll it out nationally. Herald journalists and photographers will be on-ground at the university this week for a marketing campaign, tempting students with “free merchandise and prizes.”
Bevan Shields, editor of the Herald, said the arrangement will make its journalism “more available to an audience which may otherwise struggle to access it.” He said entering into agreements with universities helps tackle “one of the biggest challenges facing all publishers around the globe: how to encourage more young readers to engage with our content.”
Ashleigh Thomas, director of commercial growth for Nine Publishing, said, “never before have we been able to offer this type of licence at scale”, calling it “a significant step in making quality journalism more accessible to the next generation.”
University of Sydney vice-chancellor and president, Professor Mark Scott, said, “we hope our community makes the most of this opportunity to access accurate and timely news and analysis, whatever their many and varied interests.”
The university’s VP of external engagement, Kirsten Andrews, adds: “It is more important than ever our community has access to the media to keep informed about important issues and stay across diverse voices and opinions.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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I think we’re fighting a losing battle here – do uni students even get news from publishers anymore? And what of the students in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years? My kids (teenagers) wouldn’t even consider going to SMH or The Australian to find “news”.
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Just what we need – further left extremism infiltrating the education sector.
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Usually these type of deals get sold at a marginal rate assuming little to no impact on retention rates for fully paid subscribers – for instance, several unis around the country already have similar deals with News Corp.
The idea, of course, is that young readers get so used to the content that they can’t live without it and as soon as they leave uni they just have to buy a full priced subscription.
It tends to be that it’s really hard to drive usage, and even harder to drive sales to graduates – and almost impossible to attribute sales to the program.
So what you end up doing is spending a fair bit of time trying to administer the program and drive usage to demonstrate value back to the partner, and you don’t make any money. Good luck to Nine for solving this problem, I’m sure they would have thought all of this through…….!
I guess I should be happy that more students will have the option of reading free content other than from News Corp, it’s a shame it’s another shareholder-beholden non-independent publisher who is keener on counting pennies than actual quality journalism.
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