News about news, and our new digital edition
Hello, dear readers!
From time to time I have hinted at things going on below the surface here at NAW. The biggest of those in terms of behind-the-scenes work (mostly performed by heroes Molly Jones and Erik Owomoyela, who designed our website’s new look and troubleshoots its functionality) is of course our transition to the new digital edition (more on that below).
However, a more exciting piece of news is that we’ve partnered with The Foreigner to bring you our page three news from Norway and other features.
The Foreigner, according to its website (theforeigner.no), is “an online news and feature publication for critically thinking people who wish to know what is current in Norway.” It’s a terrific source of Norwegian news in English, and since we can only bring you a tiny sliver of the news, I recommend you scoot on over to theforeigner.no and check it out.
The Foreigner uses a paywall system similar to ours, in that you’ll have a few free looks before being asked to subscribe. We hope you’ll like what you see and decide to support that publication as well as ours. Subscriptions cost 49 kroner per month for a 12-month period (one payment of 588 kroner for 12 months), or 59 kroner per month for shorter periods.
Which makes a lovely segue to my next point: digital access to na-weekly.com.
How is it working so far? We know we have had a few service blips already. This is, unfortunately and annoyingly, to be expected when starting up a new system. I hope the worst is behind us.
Here, as a reminder, is the scoop on the new system:
The new digital edition is the same as our webpage, www.norwegianamerican.com. Instead of posting only a few articles per week, we will now be posting all of our original articles there on the web.
The model we’re using is called a “leaky paywall.” It allows you to browse around our site for a little while, but if you read too many articles per week—in our case more than three—you’ll be asked to log in.
In addition to the articles, you have access to pdf files of the newspaper, similar to our old digital system. These are at the top of the webpage, under “Archives.” The page is password protected; email subscribe@na-weekly.com for the password.
One of the benefits of this system is that you can now share articles with your friends through email or social media. Please do! Your friends who are not subscribers will be able to read one or two, up to three articles before our site asks them to pay. By that time, we hope they’ll be hooked on NAW and want to join our community.
And here, again, is how the system works. Please note that this has changed slightly from what I told you the first time; my apologies.
• When you hit your limit of pages, the site will prompt you to “login or subscribe.”
• If you have an account, enter your email address.
• You’ll be sent an email with a link (if you don’t see the email, check your spam filter). Follow the link.
• If you don’t have an account, choose the subscription level that’s right for you and pay with Paypal. There are three options for digital subscriptions:
• One year for $30
• One month for $5
• One week for $2
Both the yearly and monthly subscriptions are recurring, meaning Paypal will keep charging you until you cancel the recurring payments. You can do so through Paypal at any time. Unfortunately, the online subscriptions for the digital addition are all handled through Paypal. If you’d rather pay with a credit card, email us at subscribe@na-weekly.com or call us at (206) 784-4617 and we’ll take care of that (for yearly subscriptions only).
If you are a print subscriber, DO NOT pay for a digital subscription—this is included with your print subscription. If you’re prompted to pay, please email us at subscribe@na-weekly.com with your subscriber number and we’ll set you up.
Once you are logged in, our site will remember you for some time (I don’t know how long; it’s a while). You will, however, need to log in on each browser or device you want to use.
Enjoy!
This article originally appeared in the Sept. 12, 2014 issue of the Norwegian American Weekly.
