A letter to our readers from The News' editor Mark Waldron

Two words which mean so much although may not necessarily do justice to my appreciation of all the loyal readers who continue to support The News since we launched our portsmouth.co.uk subscription model at the start of the summer.

Much has happened since then. We celebrated one of the greatest days in the city’s history as the host of the national D-Day 75 commemorations, basked in a heatwave and battened down the hatches against storms and high winds, have embarked on a new promotion-chasing season for Pompey (with the added backing of Hollywood star Will Ferrell) and Brexit… Actually, perhaps the less said about that the better.

But throughout it all I have been incredibly buoyed by the support from those of you who have already signed up as a subscriber to portsmouth.co.uk, happy to pay towards the brilliant journalism which provides all the latest news, sport and information every day for our wonderful city and beyond. My thanks too to those readers who have also registered as a frequent user of our site. What else can we do to persuade you to subscribe?

When we launched our new subscription model I spoke of how The News has enjoyed a proud tradition of being the trusted source of independent, high-quality journalism for more than 140 years. This journalism costs money and it is through the financial support of our readers that we can continue to transform our newsrooms and improve our unrivalled service to meet your needs in our fast-paced digital world.

And by subscribing to portsmouth.co.uk you receive a more enjoyable online news experience with fewer advertisements, daily newsletters and free access to the app version of The News.

We continue to gain new subscribers every day, all people who support and trust what we do and believe it is worth paying for. We continue to learn more about what our subscribers (and registered users) enjoy reading and that will continue to shape our content moving forward as we will write more about what interests you and less about those matters which don’t.

Obviously, the move to subscriptions was never going to be universally welcomed. I have dealt with a raft of questions and complaints on the subject and I too see the comments posted on our social media feeds. But I make no apologies for the decision we have taken. I knew that we would not take everyone with us on this exciting new news journey but at least by complaining it did show that people cared about and enjoyed the content we provide them. We could just no longer sustain this as a free service.

Apart from improving our content we continue to learn other lessons from this process, such as how do we ensure subscribing and registering is as simple as possible, how can we expand our payment options and what digital subscription we can offer to those already signed up to our print editions?

Please keep your thoughts coming.

If you have any views about our digital subscriptions or on the content we provide please contact me at [email protected] and I will respond.

If you have experienced any issues with subscribing (or registering) please contact our helpdesk at [email protected].

Thank you once more for staying with us.

Mark Waldron

Editor

The News