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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.
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 disagree completely. I think people will absolutely pay for news--but opinion is, as said upwards of here, worth exactly crap in terms of monetary value. And so little of newsreporting today has even the PRETENSE of objectivity and professional integrity that nobody is interested in paying for it. Why pay for bloggers? Blogs are free and free for a reason.
This is why the Wall Street Journal's readership is actually going UP while their competitors are losing money right and left. The WSJ has actual reporting going on, which is thorough, professionally edited and mostly free from bias and agenda. And they do a good job of keeping their news pages and opinion pages distinct from each other, unlike the Times and most of the now-dying newspaper industry.
Journalism used to be a craft, one that involved not only finding out what happened but reporting what happened objectively, leaving it to the reader to make up his or her own mind about what the story really means. Nowadays ersatz "journalists" think it's ok to be social crusaders, and objectivity is laughed off as though it were obsolete and unreasonable. (I graduated one of the nation's top journalism schools, and saw this firsthand.) This mindset is what has the newsroom in the grip of death.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.