People are paying for ad-free website access, and engaging well with other exclusive features — As we near the end of our Google News Initiative-funded project period this fall, I can’t help but look back in amazement at how much we’ve accomplished in a year. We launched four key features intended to increase revenue and drive user engagement, all focused on improving the experience for paying customers. Paid ad-free website access is now available on 13 local news websites, including The Mercury News, The Orange County Register, Press-Enterprise and more. Subscribers in the thousands are paying more for this premium tier. And engagement is steadily rising with location-aware news experiences and live virtual event attendance.

Highly engaged readers should pay more for a better experience — People who block ads online aren’t pariahs. They’re teachers, engineers, analysts, psychologists — and me. Yep, even though I’m a reporter for The Associated Press and indirectly live off the revenue of advertising, I use an ad blocker in my browser. I find many online ads to be annoying, jarring…

For the last couple of months, we’ve been conducting a novel experiment at the Bay Area News Group, the newspaper chain that owns The Mercury News and East Bay Times. We set out to see if people will pay for an ad-free experience online, but we didn’t have the engineering…

We’ve all seen our share of pop-up ads. They take over the page, block our view of whatever we had come online to see. We hunt and peck around for the little ‘X’ that will close them. Most of us do, anyway. It’s easy to say that they’re annoying, but…

We were told that the end is just the beginning. Indeed, as I leave Stanford’s John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship this month, I feel like I’m embarking on a new adventure yet again. When my wife and I arrived here from Los Angeles with our kids in tow, I knew…

First, value your audience. Then think about how to treat them. — An interview on the sidelines of a major media conference this spring led me on an improbable journey. I had already applied to the journalism-related JSK Fellowships at Stanford to examine how online publishers should address ad blockers — those free pieces of software that block the web’s annoying ads…