KATY, Texas (Covering Katy News) — When I was a kid in the late 1970s, I delivered newspapers in my neighborhood. The subscription price my customers paid was $1.50 a week. It wasn't much. But it helped keep the lights on at the local newspaper, paid reporters, and ensured that when news broke, there were reporters to cover it.
That memory has stayed with me for more than four decades. And it is the reason that when Covering Katy News returns to a metered paywall on Monday, the subscription price will be exactly $1.50 per week.
I think that's a fair price. I hope you will, too. We're charging $1.50 when inflation alone would justify asking for more than five times that amount.
Why a Metered Paywall Is Important
Newspapers began moving online in the early to mid-1990s, and most of that content was available for free while the print product required a subscription. That decision — to give away the digital product and count on advertising revenue alone — has proven to be a catastrophic miscalculation. News organizations have been going out of business at an alarming rate ever since. The internet made it possible to reach more readers than ever before, but somewhere along the way the industry convinced itself that free content and ad revenue alone were a sustainable model. They aren't. We have watched that experiment fail, again and again, in community after community.
Why? Google and Facebook came along and began vacuuming up digital advertising revenue from local markets at a scale never seen before. Those ads are not as effective as ads on local publishers' websites, but that's an argument for another editorial.
The news operations that survive long-term are the ones with a healthy, loyal subscriber base. My latest bill from the Houston Chronicle was $35.95 per month— which shows their dependence on subscription revenue too.
Three Local News Outlets That Didn't Make It
The failure of local newspapers is something that we've seen right in our own backyard. Recently, on the same day, two Houston-area community news institutions closed their doors: the Fort Bend Star, which had served much of Fort Bend County for decades, and The Leader, a Houston Heights-based publication that had given that eclectic neighborhood the hyperlocal coverage it deserved.
And then there is The Landing. This was a well-funded digital news outlet whose backers included some of the most respected philanthropic organizations in Houston — the Houston Endowment, Arnold Ventures, the Kinder Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. These are serious organizations that made serious investments in local journalism.
The nonprofit Houston Landing ceased operations and shut down on April 15, 2025, less than two years after its launch citing "financial challenges" and an inability to secure long-term, sustainable revenue streams, resulting in the layoff of 43 employees.
What did the Fort Bend Star, The Leader, and The Landing all have in common? None of them had a foundation built on readers financially supporting their journalism. When the advertising dried up or the philanthropic funding ran its course, there was nothing underneath them to hold them up.
I do not want Covering Katy to become a footnote in that story. I want this publication to be here covering news 100 years from now, living beyond our lifetimes, as newspapers used to do.
What the Metered Paywall Means for You
We are not slamming the door. The new system is a metered paywall, which means you will be able to read five articles each month at no cost before being asked to subscribe. We want you to keep reading Covering Katy. We want you to keep trusting us. We just need your help to make it sustainable.
For $1.50 a week — the same price my customers paid when I was trudging through a Northern New England neighborhood dropping the daily paper inside the customer's front storm door — you get full, unlimited access to everything we publish. Breaking news. City council coverage. School board accountability. Business openings. Local elections. The stories that matter to this community, covered by people who live here, are paying attention, and understand the issues.
Covering Katy News has been serving this community since 2011. We have no outside ownership calling the shots. What we have is our independence and a small but very experienced staff of reporters with more than 50 years of combined journalistic experience in small, medium and major market news operations. We also live here in Katy — we shop at the same stores, sit in the same traffic, and share the same concerns you do.
Katy and the communities around us are growing rapidly. We have already expanded our coverage into Waller County, and we recognize the importance of deeper coverage in Fulshear and across Fort Bend County. What happens in all of these communities will impact our quality of life. The additional revenue that comes from a subscriber base will allow us to grow our coverage to match the growth of this region.
A Personal Ask
I have spent my career in local journalism because I believe communities are better when they are informed. I believe you deserve to know what your elected officials are doing, how your tax dollars are being spent, and what is happening in your backyard. That is the work we do every single day.
I am asking you to invest in that work. Not because I'm looking to get rich — anyone who got into community news to get rich made a wrong turn somewhere — but because the alternative is what we just watched happen to the Fort Bend Star, The Leader, and The Landing.
A dollar fifty a week. The same price it was in 1978. It's still a fair deal.
—Dennis Spellman is the founder and publisher of Covering Katy News.