Five Things Jessica Lessin Needs to Keep in Mind About Paywalls as She Launches The Information

By: Mathew Ingram | Gigaom

The past year has seen the launch and growth of some fascinating new media entities — both platforms and services — including Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Medium, the crowdfunded Matter project, Paul Carr’s NSFW Corp. and Holland’s De Correspondent, to name a few. And this week we saw another being born, with the launch of former Wall Street Journal correspondent Jessica Lessin’s technology and business news venture, which is called The Information.

One of the defining characteristics of Lessin’s new offering is a hard paywall: only subscribers who pay $39 per month or $399 per year get access to the service’s content — which is more than an introductory offer her former employer has for both digital and print access to the WSJ. In a short interview with Digiday, Lessin explained why she chose this model as opposed to a leaky paywall (like the one at the New York Times) or an ad-supported model.