Access more content for less cash

The Rotherham Advertiser is proud to have brought news to the people of the borough since 1858. Last year, we joined forces with Axate to enable us to provide an improved online service.

Charging a small amount for our digital content – as we always have for our printed newspaper – helps cover the cost of sourcing stories and publishing our website, and we want to say how much we appreciate the thousands of you who signed up. The coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown of businesses has hit advertising revenues hard across the media and we’re no exception.

The Rotherham Advertiser is about democracy, about providing a platform for the population we represent to voice their opinion and holding local authorities to account when our community does not believe it has been served well.

We attend council meetings, courts and inquests and provide a public service that otherwise would not exist in Rotherham. Through campaigns such as Fighting Fit and Cash For The Community we fight for better services and even provide the money to fund them.

We wanted to continue to do this and take our readers with us. Local news works best when it’s fully accountable to its audience and owes no loyalty to anyone else.

Over the past year or so we have asked people to pay 20p to read a premium article, but we’re now offering a full day pass to our site for just 20p - a bit like the cover price of a newspaper. And these are not small pieces about overnight bin fires, for example. We have continued to provide free breaking news regarding incidents that affect, for instance, traffic, but our longer items highlighting planning applications to local authority wrong-doings, court cases, details of what’s going on in the local sports scene and our exclusive weekly columns, require a small payment.

Recently we have introduced longer reads like our weekly history features, and we’ve increased our sporting content. These improvements have been well-received by you, and we intend to provide more of them with your support.

All you have to do to read The Rotherham Advertiser online is to sign up with Axate, upload a little money to your account, and pay as you read. The great thing about Axate’s system, as so many of you have discovered, is you only pay for what you want to see and enjoy the freedom to spend as little or as much as you want on viewing content. You don’t have to promise to pay us every month; you just spend a small amount whenever you want to read an article. Your money stays in your wallet until you choose to spend it, and once you’re signed up it will work on any site which has Axate enabled.

It is simple and quick to get going and the income it generates helps sustain our commitment to quality journalism at a time when the reduced number of advertisers supporting the paper alone does not fund this. Our job, in return, is to make you want to come back often, which we can only do if we can keep investing in the coverage you want and need. As paying customers, you’re at the heart of what we do.

Andrew Mosley, Editor, Rotherham Advertiser