Boston.com has been a free news site from the time that The Boston Globe launched it in 1995. Today, after experimenting with a soft paywall for the past year, the site will be converting to a mostly paid outlet. The change is indicative of how digital advertising has lost much of its value and of how the rise of AI search has deprived news organizations of click-throughs.
“It’s going to be a lower-price option,” Boston Globe Media chief executive Linda Henry told me in an interview. “It [Boston.com] is a much smaller newsroom than the Globe, but we still think it provides an important service to our community, and we want to continue providing it. And without consumer revenue, the numbers don’t work.”
Current Globe subscribers will be charged $32 a month if they opt for digital access to the Globe, Boston.com and Boston magazine, which Globe Media acquired in January 2025. Boston.com will cost $10 a month as a standalone product. And if readers are looking only for digital access to BoMag, the price will be $24 a year, although that’s in the process of being raised to $30.
Some Boston.com content will continue to be offered for free, said Tom Brown, Globe Media’s chief consumer revenue officer. He cited real estate, which still attracts advertising, and “Love Letters,” a relationship-advice column by Meredith Goldstein, as among the features that will still be published outside the paywall.
A key part of Globe Media’s business strategy is to reel in new subscribers by charging them $1 for six months, an offer that will now be extended to the three-publication bundle. That gives the Globe time to convince readers that the paper’s journalism, as well as that of Boston.com and Boston magazine, is valuable enough to pay the full freight.
“That’s a very low barrier to entry, and we believe we’ll be able to prove to people that it’s worth paying for,” Brown said.
The evolution of Boston.com
When Boston.com made its debut 31 years ago this month, it served as a portal for the Globe and other content, including journalism from partner news organizations like Banker & Tradesman and New England Cable News. After the Globe was moved to a separate, paid site in 2011, Boston.com became a home for various types of free, quick-read stories.
Linda Henry and her husband, Globe publisher and co-owner John Henry, have long believed that it’s a mistake for newspapers to offer their journalism for free. An example of that, Linda Henry said, was the paper’s recent story about a lesbian bar called the Last Ditch in Greenfield, Massachusetts, that found itself besieged after its financially strapped owner tried to ease its masking policy. The story became a viral sensation, with the Globe adding several thousand paid subscribers in just a few days.
Unlike many other daily papers, Globe does not offer gift links for sharing articles on blogs, newsletters or social media; it does offer free one-to-one sharing via email. (There is a semi-secret workaround, though Henry said she’s thinking of tightening up on that.)
Within the newspaper business the thinking is that gift links give drive-by readers a chance to sample a paper’s journalism and entice them into subscribing. But Henry said such links may have the opposite effect: If the Greenfield story had been available through a gift link, the Globe would have lost an opportunity to sign up new subscribers and begin the process of trying to turn them into long-term customers.
“We’re really glad we didn’t have it for the Last Ditch story, because we wouldn’t have had that impact of actual people converting to subscribers,” Henry said. “So we’re now rethinking the gift article strategy and what that actually does.”
Despite the Globe’s tight paywall, Brown noted that quite a bit of Globe journalism is published for free through its multiple newsletters and social media, including short-form videos on TikTok and Instagram. Those efforts may serve as a promotional vehicle for the paper, but they rarely lead to click-throughs, he said — especially on TikTok, whose users generally stay right where they are. On the other hand, Henry said that commitment to social video has benefited Globe subscribers, since those are repackaged on a “Watch” channel on the Globe’s mobile app.
Henry’s reluctance to give away the paper’s journalism has proved successful. The Globe’s paid digital circulation is now 335,000, up from 313,000 in April of this year, she said. (About 50,000 of that comprises institutional subscriptions to universities, libraries and the like.) That growth, Henry said, has been driven not just by the Last Ditch story but by coverage of the trial and mistrial of Lindsay Clancy, accused of murdering her three children; a Spotlight investigation of a nursing-home owner who’s been able to slash costs — and quality — with little state oversight; and Boston’s ongoing obsession with sports. (The Henrys are the principal owners of the Red Sox.)
Closing in on 500,000
Several years ago, Henry said her long-term “North Star” paid circulation goal for Globe Media was 500,000 — 400,000 at the Globe and 100,000 at Stat, which covers health and medicine. It struck many observers, including me, as wildly ambitious, yet that goal now seems to be in sight, especially since Boston.com and Boston magazine subscriptions will soon be adding to the total. “We’re still looking at 500,000, but we’re going to get there a little bit sooner,” she said. Henry said she wasn’t sure how many subscriptions Stat is selling these days, though she did say it hasn’t hit 100,000. She also took a moment to note the passing of Helen Branswell, a highly regarded Stat reporter who died of cancer last week, calling it “a huge loss to the whole science community.”
The Globe’s growth runs counter to the overall downward trend in the news business. The new State of Local News report from the Northwestern University found that news deserts are spreading and that papers continue to close at an alarming rate. By contrast, Globe Media employs some 350 journalists at the Globe and its three other newsrooms.
Yet the Globe is looking increasingly isolated. For a number of years, the Globe and The Minnesota Star Tribune were often cited as proof that large regional, for-profit newspapers could make money and produce excellent journalism with committed local ownership. Earlier this year, though, the Star Tribune laid off 15% of its staff and announced it would explore a possible shift to nonprofit ownership. The Globe could soon find itself in a category of one. Is that realistic in the long run?
“I think that the best thing we could do for this organization is have it be self-sustaining,” Henry replied. “That’s way more stable than becoming a nonprofit. If it is self-sustaining, we are able to invest in having a better product and keeping up with our technology and keeping up with our newsroom.”
She also addressed the question of whether her family is committed to running the Globe for the long haul. Her answer: Yes — but.
“If things get really rocky and it becomes unsustainable, if the model flips over and we haven’t figured out how to adapt, we’re open to possibilities,” she said. “But currently there are no plans. We’re not going anywhere. We’re doing what we can to have it strong and stable for the long term.”
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