UPDATED (Aug. 24): Tribune-Herald publisher Donnis Baggett answers your pressing questions about OnlinePlus — click here

Readers of our website, wacotrib.com, may have noticed a few new buttons at the top of our home page and wondered what they’re all about.

Those buttons represent one of the biggest changes undertaken by the Waco Tribune-Herald in years. After more than a year of research and planning — and a painstaking crawl through some complex technical issues — wacotrib.com will become a subscription website on Sept. 15.

Our new Internet business model, called OnlinePlus, is the result of three significant factors related to our business:

* The Internet is maturing as a news platform and readers’ expectations are higher than before. Readers demand more than repeats of the stories from each day’s print edition. They want up-to-the-moment news and sports coverage, along with searchable databases, archives, contests, smart-phone access and social media interactivity.

* The old Internet business model of providing our content for free simply doesn’t work for newspapers. As a business we cannot justify spending millions to produce quality journalism only to give it away.

* It’s unfair to make our most loyal customers — our beloved print subscribers who have stayed with us for decades — pay for content that is free to non-subscribers.

In implementing OnlinePlus, the Tribune-Herald is near the forefront of an industry-wide trend of charging for most online content. At least two Texas dailies have already made the switch to subscription websites. The Wall Street Journal has long charged its readers for most of its online material. And The New York Times is reportedly considering shifting to a paid subscription model next year.

There was solid justification for how our paid subscriber model evolved after the Trib and its forebears began serving Waco 118 years ago. But when the Internet came along, we and most other newspapers bought into the content-for-free culture, assuming that advertising alone could support the new medium.

Those days are gone. As the Internet and related technology have matured, our industry has encountered one of the more interesting paradoxes in its long history: At no time in the history of our industry have we had so many technological tools in our hands to pass along nearly instant news and information — the foundation of journalism — while being so challenged economically.

What does this mean to our readers? If you subscribe to our print product seven days a week, it means almost nothing. You will continue to have unfettered access to our website — with not only our daily newspaper coverage but much more new content — at no additional cost.

As a “gold card” seven-day subscriber you can have it both ways — from the print edition you know and love and from the screen of your computer or smart-phone. And no matter where in the world your travels may take you, you can see what your hometown paper looks like each day via our e-Trib edition, which features digital copies of each page of the daily print edition of our newspaper.

Next week, our subscribers will receive a letter explaining how to sign up for OnlinePlus at no extra charge. Meanwhile, we encourage our online-only readers to consider a subscription for as little as $9.95 a month.

Deployed military personnel may receive a full online subscription free of charge. And our site will continue to provide free access to state, national and world news from the Associated Press, plus paid content such as obituaries, classified advertising and retail advertising.

This is a significant change, and change usually generates comments from detractors. For those accustomed to reading our work for free who might feel inclined to complain, we ask that you stop for a moment and consider what you do for a living. Then consider how you would feel if you were expected to do it for free.

Our readers expect the very best from the Tribune-Herald , and they’re perfectly justified in doing so. As the stewards of that community trust, we must position our hometown paper solidly to continue to meet your information needs.

We believe this new online business model will enable us to enhance the bounty of local journalism provided by the largest, best-trained newsroom in all of Central Texas. And we look forward to serving our readers’ needs for the next 118 years.

Carlos Sanchez can be reached at 757-5703 or csanchez@wacotrib.com.

RELATED SEARCHES

• OnlinePlus: FAQ
• Donnis Baggett: Trib's OnlinePlus package easy to use, free for 7-day print subscribers