The Latest: Bloomberg and NYT offer free access to students (April 27, 2020)

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THE NEWS

Bloomberg Media is giving undergraduate and graduate students globally free unlimited access to Bloomberg.com — otherwise priced at $40/month or $475/year — for the next three months.

SO WHAT

Bloomberg joins The New York Times, which partnered with Verizon earlier this month, to give all U.S. high schoolers free digital access for three months, in providing free news content to students as learning continues to be disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

News publishers’ past forays in the education space have generally fallen into three categories: discounted academic subscriptions, site licensing, and custom education products like supplemental teaching materials for articles. The Times and Bloomberg initiatives, however, are poised to reach a much wider audience than before, given the size of the targeted groups: There are 15 million public high school students, more than 20 million undergraduate and graduate students in the U.S. alone.

For both the Times and Bloomberg, these initiatives work to familiarize the next generation of readers with their brands at little additional cost. Once the three months are up, the immediate benefit will be from increased engagement and any conversions. The greatest impact, however, will likely be in the long-term: Joshua Benton hypothesizes that “students will likely get some version of the standard onboarding for new Times subscribers, which pushes newsletters and podcasts like The Daily,” serving as initial steps of the subscriber journey.

The two publishers have executed their programs in different ways and are targeting different audiences. The Times’ initiative is underwritten by Verizon — which avoids potentially devaluing the subscription — and builds on a smaller scale version of this partnership that provided free access to 12,000 schools in low-income areas last year. (The Times also allows individuals to sponsor individual student subscriptions.) Bloomberg, in effect, is underwriting its program itself, perhaps because it is not as concerned with undervaluing the subscription — or because it more highly values the benefit of increased exposure. Also unlike the Times, this is a new initiative for Bloomberg: The company has not offered free access to its content aside from short-scale experiments when it launched its paywall in May 2018 and unpaywalling “critical” coronavirus coverage.

Moreover, Bloomberg is targeting an international audience, which likely has partly to do with Bloomberg’s brand as a “global news organization with reporters in more than 120 countries,” and audience, since about 40% of its subscribers are not U.S.-based. The Times, meanwhile, is both building off its existing high school program and has to keep the domestic interests of its partner in mind. It also already sells campus-wide access to academic institutions, the majority of which are likely colleges, a business which it likely doesn’t want to cannibalize.

LOOK FOR

Whether these programs extend beyond their initial three-month period, and whether publishers end up expanding free trialing for other audiences.

Also look for other longer-term benefits. Unpaywalling content now could help support other education products, particularly campus-wide subscriptions. The FT, for example, experienced an increase in interest in enterprise-style packages for universities after the launch of its FT Schools initiative, where students between 16 and 19 years old were given free access to the FT.

Also look for how other publishers adapt to the pandemic by expanding existing education programs or creating new ones. Publishers like the Wall Street Journal have existing partnerships with high schools, but like the previous iteration of the Times-Verizon partnership, have limited access to the schools’ premises. Other publishers, like The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa are filling the space originally devoted to arts and sports coverage or advertising with educational material.