Washington Post To Go Paywall, Along With Buffett-Owned Local Papers

McGruber writes "The Washington Post reports that the Washington Post, and local newspapers owned by Warren Buffett, are all planning to follow the New York Times and install metered paywalls." Buffett's got more than 80 papers right now, and hasn't quit buying them. There's some time to read the WaPo sans paywall, but by mid-year it may be up.

Comments

Online International Newspapers

[TwoOfBob]

With the easy access to quality international newspapers why would one use Washington Post?

Re:Online International Newspapers

[Tx]

Presumably Buffet is making the same assumptions as Murdoch did in putting The Times (UK) behind a paywall a couple of years ago, namely that a) a tiny number of paying subscribers brings in more money in fees than millions of freeloaders do in ad revenue, and b) hopefully many more major publications will follow suit sooner or later, thus making it harder for people to get quality content for free, and so increasing the chance that they'll decide to pay for their news. There is some evidence that paywalls work if done right, and are working for the New York Post, the evidence seems slightly more mixed for The Times, I guess we're a smaller market in the UK, so it will be harder to make it work here. Whether it will be true for the Washington Post remains to be seen, but it's not completely crazy.

Re:Online International Newspapers

[SEE]

I suspect it's an attempt to replicate the Wall Street Journal model. The Wall Street Journal business/finance reporting, especially focused on the New York exchanges, is not generally replicated among mass-market newspapers. And it constitutes genuinely valuable work-related information to certain people who also have employer-provided expense accounts, these people go ahead and subscribe, and the subscriptions are paid by their employer as a business expense.

The Washington Post at least had (I don't know if they currently still do) a reputation for doing detailed nuts-and-bolts political/policy reporting on the US Federal Government in depth that nobody else matched. That is similarly genuinely valuable work-related information to certain people who also have employer-provided expense accounts, who will (presumably) then go ahead and subscribe, the subscriptions are paid by their employer as a business expense.

The Buffet-owned papers are, according to the article, going to go with "local, local, local stuff." Which is to say, the theory is the subscription will be worth it for the stuff that you can't get from a general-interest international paper. I'm more suspicious of this model; it doesn't have the advantage of the expense accounts. But it does at least try to sell something other than AP wire reports.

Re:Online International Newspapers

[schnell]

Winners: trees. Losers: senile billionaires.

Also losers: the American public.

You know how news is, like, free on the Interwebs? It's because somebody (not you) is paying for actual, trained reporters to investigate issues and write things. In this case it's the media outlets who pay for and contribute content to AP/UPI/etc. This whole arrangement was created a century ago so that a newspaper in Cleveland for example wouldn't have to send a reporter to Washington DC for politics, to New York for financial news, etc. It was a collective action among these newspapers to share costs so they could offer their local readers with national/international news coverage while paying a fraction of the price. AP/UPI wire coverage news would be the same in every newspaper basically... but local readers (and advertisers!) would choose based on the quality of the stories and value a LOCAL newspaper provides to LOCAL readers. So far so good.

But then come the Interwebs. Newspapers are used to the ad-driven model so they figure they can still pay for their local reporters and AP/UPI content through a mix of paper subscriptions (and ad rates), then put their newspaper online for free. Not so much, since online ads pay a heck of a lot less than print ads do. And the classified ads and local advertising that have effectively subsidized the business of paying actual reporters for decades have largely vanished to Internet advertising houses like Google with better localization algorithms and more pervasive user tracking. So what you end up with is newspapers trying to pay for the old style of journalism with a mix of declining print revenues (which could pay the bills) and online revenues (which aren't enough to pay the bills).

Far more damaging to newspapers: businesses like Breitbart, NewsMax, etc. that do no original reporting themselves (or at least none of value) just pay the wire service fees and are actually able to squeak by on online ad revenues, unlike the newspapers that pay for actual reporters and contribute net new content. End result: nearly all newspapers are in decline, and many if not most will go down the drain. So eventually there will be just one or two syndicated wire services and every news outlet will reprint exactly the same content, and the market for local investigative journalism will pretty much dry up since the AP wouldn't pay a reporter to spend three months exposing local corruption in the Fargo North Dakota mayor's office... whereas a Fargo newspaper might, if there still were one.

The kinda sorta flip side is that quality newspapers (or blogs or whatever) will win... once there is no "free lunch" on news, pretty much all news will have to be for-pay again. That will suck for those of us who currently don't pay for news, but the surviving outlets will have to distinguish themselves on the quality of their local or specialty reporting. Personally, I read the Washington Post online each day for free but probably wouldn't pay for it... I do however pay for a subscription to The Economist that I read on my Kindle (and throw out the weekly paper version). Maybe this is good in that in the future - after free commoditized news is dead - all news outlets will need to make their content good enough for users to be willing to pay for.

P.S. Please do not give me this "we don't need reporters or LAMESTREAM MEDIA anymore because of bloggers" BS because the world needs organizations that will actually vouch for the work of their reporters (against the threat of expensive libel suits) and provide some seal of QA on the veracity of reportage. Imagine a world where the only sources of news are a million different jackass versions of The Drudge Report or The Huffington Post... except with no "real" news to link to.

Re:Online International Newspapers

[Celarent Darii]

What you say would be true, but the fact is that newspapers don't really do any reporting now. Most news is actually just another way to advertise a new product or editorialize on some topic. Outlets like FoxNews are really just entertainment masquerading as news. The same could be said of all the major 24-hour news stations and weekly papers. I would gladly pay for a magazine, even online, if they actually did some reporting and not simply copy the Reuters feeds. Even look at the newspapers on any given day, they are reporting the exact same events, even with the same clichés.

Firefox to the rescue

[vivek7006]

Firefox rules. I have been using addons refcontrol to take care of paywalled websites like nytimes.com, wsj.com etc.
linky: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

Re:Firefox to the rescue

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You do know that only works because enough people don't care to use it, right?

Maybe in the "not going out of business" sense that is true. But in the specific sense of "if a lot of other people do that too, they will close the loophole" what you wrote is not true. The reason that it is not true is their "paywall-model" is based on high porosity. They want people to be able to read a limited number of articles with as little friction as possible in order to get them hooked enough to pay for unlimited access.

The problem is that they can't be both highly porous and completely locked down. If it comes to that, their current business model will fall apart. The highly-locked down paywall model has been shown to fail in most cases, only working for very specific markets and general interest news has not been one of them.

Re:Firefox to the rescue

[ShanghaiBill]

it only works because the companies are real lazy ...

Not lazy. Smart. They want as many readers as possible, paying or not, because those readers generate ad revenue and "buzz" as they discuss the articles, and put links to them in blogs, facebook posts, etc. They would rather have as many of those readers pay up as possible, but would rather keep them as unpaying customers than lose them completely. So they put up a paywall to get revenue from readers willing to pay, but they still keep the readers that are willing to put in some effort to circumvent the paywall.

The situation is similar with software. Software publishers want people to pay, but would rather have people "pirate" their software than not use it at all, because they know that helps them build market share in the long run.

Re:google news settings

[ThatsMyNick]

While we are at it, is there a slashdot option for hiding summaries with paywalled sites?

Re:I don't get it.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

What am I missing? Is there separate pages that paid subscribers are seeing that I am not? More articles available? What?

The NYTimes paywall is intended to let everybody read a limited number of articles per month with no hassle at all - exceed the limit and you run into a paywall on all of their articles. The thing is that it relies on cookies in your browsers to keep track of how many articles you've read. So, if you do things like spoof your referrer to be google and never let their website set a cookie, you are unlikely to ever be hassled by their paywall.

Re:google news settings

[SEE]

Or to blacklist sites in some way?

Click on the gear icon in the upper right, look down to "Adjust Sources", then adjust how often you see results from that source down to "Never".

Decline of Newspapers began before the web

[knorthern knight]

I believe that the newspaper industry's underlying problems existed before the internet. Yes, the internet exacerbated them and sped up the collapse, but they were around before the internet. I believe that, even without the internet, these problems would've eventually hit newspaper publishing revenues, but it would've taken longer to do so.

    First question... what was the newspaper business model? For many advertisers, newspapers were the only source of eyeballs for their products/services before the internet. Newspapers used their print advertising monopoly to charge extremely high ad rates, which paid for...
* the cost of printing/running the ad
* paying reporters and foreign correspondents all over the country and around the world
* and a nice fat 30%+ annual ROI for shareholders
In plain English, newspapers effectively levied a tax on advertisers. This defacto "advertising-tax" paid for newspaper journalism, among other things.

    The newspaper business model, which subsidized journalism, could be attacked by advertisers getting their products/services in front of customer eyeballs by a method other than newspaper ads ("advertising-tax avoidance"). The "advertising-tax avoidance" scenario played out over the years...

* "Auto Trader Magazine" was established in 1977. See http://www.manta.com/c/mmj727f/auto-trader-magazine It had one major advantage over newspaper classifieds... it did not have the overhead of paying for the salaries/accomadations/airline-tickets of reporters all over the planet. It was an advertising "pure play", that had a lot less overhead than a newspaper, and could make a profit while charging much lower ad rates.

* Right now in Toronto (where I live) there are 2 or 3 free weekly employment "papers" (to use the term loosely) that can be picked up at newspaper boxes around the city. They're 1/2 tabloid size. One reason they can use the free model is that they don't have to pay for reporters, etc. The ads paid for by employers are sufficient.

* Back in the mid-1980's, when I was looking for a place to live in Toronto, I found "The Real Estate Weekly". It was a free 1/2 tabloid put out by the local MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a co-operative venture of local real estate firms. It had a lot more leeway that Auto Trader or the employment weeklies. Auto Trader and the employment weeklies are put out by for-profit corporations. "The Real Estate Weekly" could break even, or even lose a bit of money. But as long as it cost the the member real estate firms less than running ads in local papers, the real
estate firms came out ahead.

* Major national chains began printing their own advertising flyers and having newspapers insert them ("advertising inserts"). The original reason was that it was a pain for a national outfit to co-ordinate running the same ad at the same time at dozens of papers across the country, or even a region. Also, there were some newspapers that didn't have 4-colour presses, and were physically incapable of printing the multicoloured ad inserts. Then the national chains found out that it cost a lot less to do their own printing, and let the newspapers do the physical delivery. Then, with falling newspaper circulation, it became obvious that the newspaper deliveries covered only part of the target market. The only way to cover all of a market was to either...
    - have a private firm deliver the flyers door-to-door (suitable for single-dwelling units)
    - or send the flyers as 3rd-class "junkmail" to all units in rental and condominium buildings

    Notice something about the 4 examples above? There is no mention whatsoever of the internet or the World Wide Web. Even in a pre-web world, newspapers were losing classified ad revenues for used cars, employment, real estate, and retail advertising to non-newspaper competitors. The competitors have now expanded to websites, but the first losses were occuring before the web existed.