Click here or here to view a list of Digital Subscription Frequently Asked Questions

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Reporters. Editors. Photographers. Advertising and production personnel. Newspaper carriers.

The list goes on and on when you're talking about what it takes to make a newspaper, a website and more.

Oh, and money -- it takes money to pay those 500 people and to buy computers, keep the lights on and put gas in the delivery trucks.

So, we hope you will understand when we announce that on Jan. 7, we will make our websites (wvgazette.com and dailymail.com) available through digital subscriptions.

If you are already a subscriber to one of our daily print newspapers, you will see no change on Jan. 7. All of our digital products will be part of your current subscription price.

But, if you read our news only online, you will be asked to subscribe after you read 10 stories in a 30-day period.

A digital subscription to one of our websites costs $1.99 for the first month. After that, it's $5.99 a month.

During the past few years, as more and more newspapers and entire corporate chains of papers began charging for their websites, the Gazette and Daily Mail resisted.

But times continue to change. The explosion of online news has provided both an opportunity and a challenge to traditional news sources.

Thanks to the Web, more people than ever before are reading our stories, looking at our photos and videos and delving into our blogs. Readers look at millions of our Web pages every month, hungry for the kind of West Virginia news that only the state's two flagship newspapers can bring.

The challenge of the Internet lies with advertising. When a million websites are all competing for ads, it can be a challenging endeavor, to say the least.

If those millions of page views tell us anything, it's that the work of our staffs has value. In a time when people routinely pay a dollar for a bottle of water, is that value $5.99 a month? Of course not. It's vastly higher than that, but it's tough to put a price on the work of a professional journalist.

Creating the kind of news you've come to expect from the Gazette and Daily Mail is like creating any other product -- it costs.

A subscription, whether it be paper or digital, is the best way to help us keep you informed.

To inquire about a subscription, call our Customer Service Department at 304-348-4800.

For more information, please see the list of frequently asked questions following this story.