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Paywalls To Drive Journalists Away In Addition To Consumers?
Hugh Pickens writes "With news organizations struggling and newsroom jobs disappearing, each week brings new calls from writers and editors who believe their employers should save themselves by charging for Internet access. However, in an interesting turnabout, the NY Times reports that Saul Friedman, a journalist for more than 50 years and a columnist for Newsday since 1996, announced last week he was quitting after Newsday decided that non-subscribers to Newsday's print edition will have to pay $5 a week to see much of the site, making it one of the few newspapers in the country to take such a plunge. 'My column has been popular around the country, but now it was really going to be impossible for people outside Long Island to read it,' he says. Friedman, who is 80, said he would continue to write about older people for the site 'Time Goes By.' 'One of the reasons why the NY Times eventually did away with its old "paywall" was that its big name columnists started complaining that fewer and fewer people were reading them,' writes Mike Masnick at Techdirt. 'Newspapers who decide to put up a paywall may find that their best reporters decide to go elsewhere, knowing that locking up their own content isn't a good thing in terms of career advancement.'"
Reading this, it strikes me that news sites are just big blogging sites. No blogger would want their content hidden behind a paywall, and reporters are more and more just professional bloggers.
i heard any AC remark you've made while logged in can be made public, as they are all recorded. Any concerns?
Opinion columnists are just like bloggers. Even if there is a sound argument for a news organization to succeed by putting up a pay-wall on their website (and I believe that a good news organization could do so and succeed), it does not apply to opinion columnists who are not providing anything different than bloggers do.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"...their best reporters decide to go elsewhere, knowing that locking up their own content isn't a good thing in terms of career advancement."
"Friedman, who is 80.."
Yes. Yes, that is obviously why. More readers to further his career.. yes, that must be it.
From TFA:
Customers of Cablevision, the cable and Internet provider that owns Newsday, and people who subscribe to Newsday in print will still be able to browse Newsday.com unfettered
Would any of the currently proposed net neutrality laws prevent Cablevision from charging other people for web content that it gives to its own ISP customers for free? Or is this considered an acceptable competitive practice?
The fact is that writing as a profession has such low barriers to entry these days these days (all you need is a keyboard, an internet connection, and a deal in place to host your published ideas), and the concept that ideas from certain writers are more valuable than others seems to be misguided.
Instead, sites should focus on improving their most worthwhile content by making sure their best writers are writing IN DEPTH INVESTIGATIVE STORIES that elevate the nationwide discussion. For what it's worth, the strategy of publishing mounds of opinionated drivel is being demonstrated to lead to minimal success.
Though, while we're here I'd like to plug my own source of potentially opinionated drivel at my site and invite anybody who thinks my ideas are worthwhile to help me get some of my ideas published in the mainstream media (which unrelentlessly still controls 90% of the power within the news publication game).
Both the Newsday columnist who resigned over the Newsday paywall and the NY Times columnists who protested the NY Times paywall are just that: columnists, not reporters or journalists.
Columnists are people for whom the newspaper is a vehicle for the broad distribution of their writings, which are not even notionally constrained by the standards of fact reporting, or even news analysis. Columns are vehicles by which the columnists ideas, pet causes, ideology, other products (like books), etc., are promoted. The interests of columnists may be very different than the interests of journalists with regard to paywalls.
I think the meme that everyone is having such trouble shaking off is the idea of "objective" news. While I would argue that there has never been such an animal, the future definitely belongs to viewpoint-specific publications. There may well be a market for the AP/Reuters news service model, but after that I just don't see the rest surviving.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
From a mile-high view I believe that the swelling of "news" organizations since techno-social growth will - naturally - shrink to a manageable size. Those in control of the news in this downsizing will have (sorry ... *should have*) a responsibility to us (as the consumers) to report more news and less opinion.
Either way, times will still be trying for the ones that remain and my recommendation to them is to partner and merge with "access" technologies - such as the iPod, Blackberry, and other smart connect / convenience technologies.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
I'd support up to a dollar per week, 20% discount for year-paid, for a couple of may favorite online news sites. But not $250 a year. Printing and distribution costs are nearly negligible then. All the money would go to paying reportors and editors. It sounds like the print media did not learn the "Goldilocks" online music tale: CDs too much, napster too little and iTunes about right. When you get it right you'll have paying customers.
Linux Weekly News (LWN.net) has managed to keep going by having a temporary paywall. That is, you pay to get immediate access to articles, and after a week, anyone can see them. This might work in some cases, at the least, you could generate some revenue if people were willing to pay for immediate access, while not driving away the authors who want many readers. I will say that for LWN, they're making some money but they certainly aren't rolling in it, so even if that works, it will not bring back the massive money inflows that these organizations are used to.
Let's be honest: There is a glut of news organizations, and consolidation WILL happen. The internet has permanently changed the market. I don't see that the U.S. government needs to get involved; we have NOT lost the ability to receive news. Yes, many news organizations are going out of business, and in the future we will need fewer of them. But that's simply how competition works.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Will happen? Then what is AP and Reuters?
And how exactly will this consolidated news company report local news.
Modern news distribution derives its value from two things: First, the reliability of its product. Second, the timeliness of its product. Newspapers and magazines fail the test because they are release daily, weekly, or even monthly -- whereas other distribution mediums can do it in seconds or minutes. This is not, however, what killed them. The deciding factor is therefore the reliability of the product. Unfortunately, the news industry has made several very bad decisions regarding this:
First, was catering to certain groups (liberals, conservatives, etc.) and following the demographics rather than the story. While this improves profitibility over the short term, it sets things up for a diminishing returns cycle -- to maintain the higher profitibility the product must be targeted more with each iteration, leading to an alienation of those who do not share the increasingly-restricted viewpoint. That is to say, they become aware of the bias and lose confidence in the product. This "short sell" ideology permeates many industries -- in some cases, the results are more dramatic and immediate than other cases.
Second, was the packaging of such information. Even leading up to the 9/11 media event, packaging of information from major news sources was being called into question. Scandals rocked the New York Times, Washington Post, and all major television networks within a three-year timespan -- why? In every case, the rush to get the information to press caused errors to be made. In other words, a lack of process control. The coverage of 9/11 -- with its constant flood of meaningless and un-contextualized data overloaded people. Simply put, anything that's "hot" is over-saturated and in their rush to deliver the latest "news" they bury people in a crap-flood of information -- there was a loss of impact.
The third factor in the loss of reliability of major media organizations was a lack of peer review. Because most of the media distribution in this country is owned by a select few individuals and/or corporations, the industry homogenized. There was no further innovation. In the quest for profitibility, only methods of reporting and investigation were used that guaranteed eyeballs. As history has shown time and time again, the key to the long-term survival of a business, or industry, is adapability. This was sacrificed when the industry homogenized into only a few major corporate players -- leading to formulaic products that were too similar to one another.
Finally, the rise of social networking and the internet proved that word of mouth is the most effective way of spreading information that is NOT time-sensitive. Ironically, the random churning of information on the internet was better at distributing stories than decades-old systems of distribution: Why? Because the information had been separated out into a free-format. Like CDs, where you have to purchase the entire album in order to get that one song -- this was how the media operated. No longer -- and the result was that over a period of days or weeks, many millions more would see a given product because of referrals by friends. The news industry failed to capitalize upon this by creating stand-alone product that could be distributed between people and remain intact (for example, with its advertising or "related" content hooks, perhaps in something similar to PDF).
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This sounds like the perfect way to solve their financial issues. Why, just the other day I had a fire burning in my back yard. I did what any other sound-minded individual would do: I poured gasoline on the fire. You see, if I make things worse by increasing the rate at which the fire is burning, eventually there will be nothing left to burn and the fire will be gone.
In the same regard, by alienating their employees and consumers, these people will eventually stop taking part in the traditional (and failing) news system. If there are no whining consumers or disgruntled employees, then the problem will be solved! It will burn itself out!
I fail to see any flaws in the plan.
>There is a glut of news organizations, and consolidation WILL happen.
I think it HAS happened, not will happen. But only if you consider the big media conglomerates are actual news organizations rather than infotainment.
Not true for threereasons:
1) Most reporters just regurgitate whatever their sources give them (do you ever read what they usually write in a follow up on a crime?)
2) There are bloggers like Radley Balko who have stronger reporter bona fides than most of the people who work at the NY Times.
3) There are many reporters who run blogs as part of their business.
Reporters may leave if their newspaper starts charging for content, yes. However, I think a few more reporters might leave if the newspaper goes bankrupt. People aren't buying newspapers any more. They may not want to pay for online content now, but that's mostly because the 'free' online content is being subsidized by papers which are rather quickly going out of business. As that happens, the remaining papers will end up charging for online content (since how else will they make any money) and people will either pay for it (because there's no other option for getting good journalism) or not pay for it (because they'd rather read free blogosphere crap). But if there's one thing I'll lay odds on, it's that expensive content (like good journalism) isn't going to be available for free. TANSTAAFL, you know.
Holy tardmagnetism batman, why are they charging $5 a week!! That is almost as much or more than most people pay for the goddamn internet each month (most being on dialup or dsl that is). Are they flaming umbrella eaters? Also, it costs more to deliver and print a newspaper than it does to host web content, they don't seem to be factoring that into the savings. It looks to me as they are trying to charge real-life newspaper delivery charges ($0.70/day) on delivering web content. Now if they charge like $4 or $5 a month you might do it right for premium news content written by professional writers. Most wouldn't be it would get a lot more attention than trying to rape someone for $5 a week.
Heck Netflix delivers on the rather expensive business of renting videos (having to pay royalties to MPAA and buy/package/deliver discs constantly, not to mention paying developers/IT to manage a more complicated website than a news site) and their cheapest plan is $5/month. Then again, they don't have to produce the movies we see, so their costs aren't high in that regard though they are passing the costs the movie industry sees fit onto us. I'm guessing they have very narrow profit margins, but they manage to stay successful and relevant unlike newspapers.
Right now they make some advertising cash off the websites which probably accounts for quite a bit of money but far from the amount they would need to maintain salaries they are used to based on what they've made in the past. However, charging causes viewership to go down which will impact the amount made off of advertising. Maybe this $5/week is considered to be the point at which the subscriptions would make more than the advertising and any less than that would scare away enough readers as to make free more lucrative. But, my guess is that they just wanted to charge as much as they do for real-life delivery because they don't know how to approach the internet because they're geriatric old farts.
What is more, they charge $0.50 if you get it from the news stand, which would only be $2.50 a week not including overcharging us on Sunday for around $2.00 an issue. Assuming six Sundays around $12.00 + $10 worth of daily issues, that's $22 a month if you buy from news stands. However, these brilliant leaders of industry are going to charge you $20/mo to view it on the internet? Hilarious.
I remember just a decade ago, they were only charging a 25 cents for a paper, the increase to double that seems to be arbitrary and unnecessary to me. It looks like greed pure and simple, and when the internet came around they essentially shot themselves in the foot because it looks way cheaper to not pay for news at all now. Of course, free will always be more appealing, but 25 cents was low enough to make newspaper content desirable. Therefore, if they want 90% (20 / 22) of what they would realistically charge in real life, which I posit should be $7 rounded (0.25 * 30, assuming we would not be charged any differently for Sunday papers) a month not $22, then they would charge about 21 cents a day instead. That comes out to $1.47 a week, starting to look a little more realistic? Like, something you wouldn't mind paying if you knew the content was backed by quality journalism?
It is pretty obvious they didn't give much thought to any of this. I've given it far more time in a /. comment, lolwaffles.
You mean like how Vox Day, who is a very big libertarian blogger, has made Paul Krugman look like an utter fool time and again on his blog? Or the way that Maureen Dowd consistently writes stuff that is no better than 90% of the stuff posted daily on the Huffington Post?...
A machine that will be proud of us
We can never connect AI to the internet...
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
I used to read Thomas Friedman's oped column regularly until the NY Times put him behind their paywall. Eventually they dropped the paywall but by then I was too late. I just didn't care that much any more. The few times I did pick up his column I realized that except for his columns on the middle east (his field of expertise) there wasn't much that he had to say that was incredibly relevant. I'm probably one of the few people that found his book, "the World is Flat" to be incredibly uninsightful.
The paywall made me realize that for the most part there isn't much separating such oped columns from the average blogger. However had the NY Times not put up the paywall I probably would still be reading their oped columns regularly.
I define as journalists anybody who writes for a publication according to a certain set of standards.
The main standard is that you're committed to telling the truth more than you are to promoting a cause. As Richard Feynman said, if the facts go against your position, you have to report those facts. Same rule for journalists and scientists.
Traditionally, a newspaper columnist started out as a reporter, and after he mastered the job, he moved up to writing a column (sort of like a cop who gets promoted to detective). And Saul Friedman was a reporter at Newsday before he became a columnist.
There was a bad practice at the New York Times and elsewhere of making columnists out of people who had never worked as journalists, and who often had nothing to offer beyond an ideological position. Example: William Kristol.
Molly Ivins wrote about this. She said that when you work as a reporter, you learn how to figure things out and get to the facts in a hurry. You cover a school board meeting, people are throwing charges back and forth, and a reporter has to figure out what's going on. Ivins said that a lot of columnists were political appointees, and never learned how to do that. They never learned basic fact-checking. So they can't even get their basic facts right. Just because some economist at the Heritage Foundation or some guy at the CIA said something, that doesn't mean it's true.
Some bloggers are journalists. They check out their facts, and report the facts no matter whose ox gets gored. I pay to read that.
Some bloggers just spout their own opinions and cut and paste whatever they happen to agree with. They're not journalists. Most of them aren't worth reading, even for free.
Neither the AP nor Reuters is a consolidation. They are wire services, making it possible for news and art to be distributed to papers far and wide who pay for their services. They actually do more to support a greater multitude of newsrooms that can rely on their service for world news while remaining local to their communities to report their regional and local stories.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Just went to check out the Newsday site. It's so ugly and hard on the eyes that I'm not sure I'd visit it if they paid me for it.
If only one could get that wonderful feeling of accomplishment without having to accomplish anything.
You should take a look at this abomination of a news website. It's laughable to think that ANYONE in their right mind would pay for access to such a thing. Of course, it's owned by the same guys who own the Madison Square Garden NYC sports teams and a big suburban NYC cable company, so they think they know it all. javascript :: Newsday as NY Knicks :: Pro Basketball
I stopped going there earlier this year when they rolled out their new look. Seriously, they would have to pay me to visit that site on a regular basis.
What people have come to expect on the Internet is "free". If it isn't free, there must be someone else offering it, legally or not, for free. And the modern Internet user is going to take it from where it is offered for free.
That pretty much means that newspaper classified ads aren't going to work - people just go to Craigslist. It means that selling music online isn't going to work, because it is all out there for free, unless you need Apple to hold your hand and guide you through the process of filling up your iPod.
It certainly means that news, opinion and commentary aren't going to work if you want people to pay for them.
Unfortunately, if you are someone that was getting paid to produce textual material as news, opinion or commentary, you probably aren't going to get paid to do that any longer. There just isn't any call for someone to get paid to do something that will generate zero revenue. Similarly, with aggregation and Google, nobody needs to know where the original text came from, so you can't count on ad revenue supporting a site that in turn supports the writer. The original site can't control the material any longer. Google might tell you where it came from (not as a link, but just text) but what other sites are also copying the content and not attributing it.
There is no such thing as a correctly priced pay wall. There is only free content and content one should pay for. As long as there is so much free around, nobody is going to bother paying a single penny.
Seems the journalists in question want the best of both worlds: they want the steady and considerable income that comes with working for a major newspaper, but on the other hand they don't want to be involved with earning any of the revenue that makes that income possible. Eventually they're going to have to choose one or the other (or the market will make the choice for them).
Every time he writes about me, even if I am in a car accidents or similar. I want to have a piece of his income.
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You said:
Thesis: The MSM has to deal with an audience that is polarized, distracted, transient, and lazy. The appropriate product for that audience is biased, sensationalized, cheap, and simplified. The thougthful online audience doesn't pay the bills. This leads the MSM to pander to the polarized, lazy audience, resulting in a product whose content and style alienates thoughtful people. A vicious circle that results in a gradual loss of reliability.
1) The polarization of the audience is a pressure external to the MSM to which the big papers and television have had to adapt. Culture War is a term that describes the aggressive, polarized public sphere America has been experiencing for about 30 or 40 years. The idea that America is at war with itself has appealed to political activists who promote extreme rhetoric advocating their point of view. We have seen the rise of privately funded "think tanks" producing analysis and science that c/overtly promotes a certain line of thinking. The MSM has been met by the non-MSM, like conservative talk radio, which has taught millions of people the New York Times is a commie rag. This is the atmosphere to which a MSM news organization has to adapt. The MSM papers are caught up in a whirlpool of accusations of bias from 2 sides (and more) from which it is very difficult to escape. Read the comments sections of many papers for signs of the insanity, especially on articles linked from the DrudgeReport.
You have called this a loss of reliability of the news paper. We might call it a loss of reliability of the reader who is so consumed by his point of view that he interprets every alternative point of view as a declaration of war. These readers can no longer be trusted to demand quality journalism. Instead they want affirmative journalism. This leads to a lowest-common-denominator media analysis that screams bias everywhere it goes.
2) The MSM no longer has a lock on the attention of the average person. Hard news is hard to make and hard to consume, and most people don't bother.
I actually let Paul Krugman know that the NY Times had put his stuff behind a paywall (this was about six years ago when the Times tried to do this for a couple of years) via his Princeton email. I let him know I'd probably have to stop reading his columns because the subscription to the Times website wasn't worth it to me (I wasn't going to pay good money to read idiots like Friedman or Brooks) and, because of that, I wouldn't have access. He wrote back to me and seemed genuinely unaware that this was happening, although that's not surprising - he just sent his columns in, got paid, and assumed that the Times knew what it was doing in distributing his material. This is something that authors need to look at a lot more closely these days. And, BTW, Krugman is a really gracious and forthcoming guy. He took the time to answer email from a random stranger and engaged in a couple of back and forth messages about the issue. I was impressed with the guy's candor and responsiveness.
That is all.
But if you want some admiration for your ingenious use of the English language, here is your reward: clap, clap, clap, you are fucking clever...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
An all or nothing subscription model does not work online, and you sacrifice the interactivity and viral attributes of the internet - which to most is the most important.
Newspapers need to realize the paper is more of a tradition at this point. And the tradition is over.
Web 101:
- If one page out of a free book isn't free, we will skip that page.
- If pages require special steps to view them, you are censoring your own content from the web.
- We simply do not read whole sites. Most of us don't read an entire newspaper, but its way worse online. You cannot sell a whole site.
In the olden days the subscription costs basically paid for the cost of delivering the paper but most or all of the additional revenue came from advertising. Now that the delivery can be done for free there's no need to pay subsrciptions. I think it's basically just greedy newspaper owners who figured they could pocket some extra money now that they don't have to pay for delivery.
With the invention of the internet the main stream media companies are being caught more and more in their lies. From the lies that got us into the Iraq war to the photoshopped picture of the London bombers, the internet is exposing lie after lie. Is it any wonder that the more tech savvy generation realizes that most "news" is in fact just propaganda supporting a particular world view? And who is dumb enough to pay for propaganda?