As of Jan. 3, readers will need a subscription to access most of The Day’s digital content.

We’ve upped our digital game in recent years, posting all our news, features, opinion and sports content on theday.com and adding professionally produced live streams of local high school sports, news videos, podcasts and photos you won’t see anywhere else.

When news breaks, we post it as soon as we confirm the basics, and continue updating theday.com as we get more information.

Quality journalism is expensive to produce, and we need digital subscribers to sustain and grow our independent local news company. The Day has been here since 1881 and we plan to stay.

“We have a newsroom full of very talented journalists who work hard every day to produce an impressive amount of unique, local content,” said Timothy Dwyer, publisher and president. “The gathering, production and distribution of that content comes at a cost. Like any local business we cannot sustain our business model if we give away our product for free. The decision to require a subscription to access our digital content is no different than what we ask of our print subscribers.”

Dwyer continued, “For those of you who are familiar with our ownership model (we donate our profit to the community) you know this is not a decision based on greed or a desire to line the company’s pockets. It is simply necessary to ensure that we can continue to bring all our readers the award-winning local news that they have come to expect from The Day.”

Many news companies offered their digital content for free in the early days of the internet, but most, including The Day, soon realized we would need to charge readers to continue operating a news website.

Producing great local content 24/7 is a huge effort that, in the newsroom alone, involves reporters, photographers, editors and designers with specialized training and equipment. We also have a business staff along with overhead costs and mileage.

For the past five years, readers could access three free articles per month before a subscription was required. Beginning this coming Tuesday, readers will be required to subscribe to access most articles.

While most of our content will be behind the so-called paywall, we’ll turn off the paywall for breaking stories about public safety emergencies that need to reach our entire audience.

Our video content, including GameDay live streams of high school sporting events and news/features videos, will remain free on our Youtube channel, @thedayct.

Now is a great time to subscribe. We’ve got a lot of compelling stories lined up to publish in 2023, including the continuation of our Housing Solutions Lab.

Digital subscriptions are $18 for four weeks, but we’re offering an introductory price of $1.50 per week for 13 weeks.

Karen Florin is The Day’s engagement editor. Reach her at k.florin@theday.com or (860) 701-4217.