Facebook screengrabs, Kevin McCabe and why Yorkshire Post online paywall exists: Chris Burn

I thought it was worth explaining a little bit about our thought process on why that is after seeing what happened to the online version of my interview with commercial property tycoon and former Sheffield United owner Kevin McCabe recently.

The main angle of the first of a two-part interview with Mr McCabe related to what he told me about his decision to build in Scarborough for the first time despite his company being named after his adopted hometown.

Understandably, the story about the ongoing redevelopment of the town’s shopping centre picked up some local interest in Scarborough and the story was shared on a local community Facebook page.

After some complaints that the story was behind our paywall, one person took it upon themselves to post screengrabs from the article paragraph by paragraph so the entire thing could be read for free by anyone who came across the page.

I imagine the person believed they were doing group members a favour and it was essentially a victimless act. However, I thought it would be worth explaining the process behind doing an interview like the one we conducted with Mr McCabe to show why doing a piece of work like that is anything but free to produce.

After being offered the opportunity to interview Mr McCabe, hours of research went in beforehand into his career, controversies and what his company has been up to so as to ensure I could ask relevant questions.

Travelling to meet him involved a two-hour round trip and the interview also took the best part of two hours to conduct. I was also accompanied on the job by one of our skilled photographers, Jonathan Gawthorpe.

Writing the piece took the best part of a day, with further hours spent on editing down an initial 3,000 word draft to the 1,400 words that appeared in print and online.

Meanwhile, the second story about Mr McCabe’s unhappiness at the UK’s litigation system after he lost control of Sheffield United in a bitter legal fight involved the careful reading of court judgements and approaching other parties involved in the cases to ensure we could write an accurate and legally-safe account.

Additional efforts went into to the editing of Jonathan’s photos, along with the page design and subbing process.

In short, hours and hours of work from multiple people went into the articles that were produced at a cost to The Yorkshire Post.

I was pleased with the pieces that were produced and believe them to be journalism worth paying for. That is the driving force of our online subscription strategy – creating exclusive articles that readers won’t get elsewhere.

While obviously our print readers pay for their copies of The Yorkshire Post, we are still in the foothills of online readers getting used to doing so. There are many reasons for that but the bottom line is we see digital subscriptions as a key part of being able to continue to produce quality journalism.

Chris Burn is Head of Business and Features at The Yorkshire Post.