For some readers, tampabay.com starts charging

After making substantial improvements to tampabay.com, we now ask readers who turn most often to our website to help support it financially.

This change reflects the growing importance of electronic publishing. Most of our news breaks first on tampabay.com. It features video, special reports, blogs and archives that go beyond the possibilities of print.

Tampabay.com still offers free access up to a point — set now at 15 page views per month. To get past that ceiling, readers need to register and pay. Our best customers get the best price, with discounts for subscribers to our print edition.

Some parts of tampabay.com will continue to offer unlimited access. The meter does not count visits to the home page or to PolitiFact.com, our service that measures the truth of what politicians are saying. Readers also can tap into Things To Do, or the sections that advertise cars, homes and jobs, as much as they like.

For 35 years, I have started my day by collecting the Times from my front lawn, usually before dawn. But now I also turn several times each day to tampabay.com, to see what else we've got. I expect our presses to keep turning for many years to come, but the electronic editions are also central to our business.

These days, we tell stories with both ink and electrons. Both formats draw deeply upon our journalism, and both must help sustain it.

Since we launched the new version this year, tampabay.com has widened its lead as the favorite news and information website covering this region. Every day, more readers discover it is a place worth spending a good bit of their time, and now — we believe — a little of their money.

• Read more about how tampabay.com's digital subscriptions will work in our FAQ