Column: You must subscribe for complete package

The Republican Eagle has started labeling its enterprise packages, investigative stories, selected features and columns with a “subscriber exclusive” icon. This is our way of helping readers identify those stories available first and often solely to our paying subscribers.

Readers of the print and paid online editions saw the icon for the first time July 14 when we labeled Michael Longaecker’s narcotics investigations stories.

We have had an exclusive in every edition since and anticipate identifying at least one exclusive in each edition in the weeks ahead.

But readers should be aware that there are always several items that only subscribers receive; we don’t necessary label them all.

Our subscribers help keep us in business. We hold the philosophy that they deserve special consideration above what the users of our free Internet site see every day.

Put another way, we don’t give away everything our news and sports staffs produce.

Therefore, you will rarely see the full story of anything slugged “subscriber exclusive” on our free website. When we choose to post such stories online, they won’t appear until several days or even a week after the print and paid online editions have been published.

For those of you who don’t know about our paid online product, you can see it at www.republican-eagleplus.com. A subscription costs less than $5 a month.

The pages are identical to the print edition — photos, headlines, advertisements and more.

But by clicking on a photo, headline or story, readers can enlarge the items for easy viewing and printing. You also can print full pages.

Visitors to our standard or free website — www.republican-eagle.com — can get a taste of what they’re missing by clicking on the Subscriber Exclusives tab in the navigation bar.

Sometimes we will promote our exclusives on that website’s homepage. We hope our regular online readers will see what they’re missing and consider picking up a copy of the print version or augmenting their online use with the republican-eagleplus.

Our standard website offers readers some perks, too. We use it to provide breaking news and then updates as stories unfold. The print product can’t do that.

The site also has photo galleries, videos and interactive features plus blogs that our print and paid products don’t have.

For a well-rounded look at what’s happening in the Red Wing area, we encourage readers to use a blend of these products. Each, we believe, has something special — something exclusive — that you won’t want to miss.

Tags: subscriber exclusives, anne jacobson, opinion, columns