Paywalls To Drive Journalists Away In Addition To Consumers? 131
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.'"
Net Neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
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 Return of the Pamphleteer (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Brief delay might work; Consolidation WILL happen (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux Weekly News (LWN.net) [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.
Re:Reporters are basically bloggers then (Score:4, Interesting)
Used to read NY Times oped before paywall (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sounds like a perfect solution. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Used to read NY Times oped before paywall (Score:1, Interesting)
There is rich critical commentary on the hilariousness of that book available on the internet. One of my favorites is this one:
http://rolocroz.com/junk/friedman.html [rolocroz.com]
Quoting a bit:
by the end--and I'm not joking here--we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce.
Re:Reporters are basically bloggers then (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't decide to get out of the business because my ego was bruised that I wasn't accomplishing a lofty goal - I got out of it because I moved into fields where I have been able to do some good.
Heh, interesting. Did you know that road runs both ways?
I've fallen sideways into part-time journalism because I wanted to do some good. After 4 years of work with NGOs in a developing country, I realised that some important issues just weren't getting the analysis (and attention) they deserved, so I started writing a weekly column in one of the national newspapers. It helped my work quite a bit, because whenever I had a conversation with someone, we'd have common context to work with.
Since then, I was asked to write a general purpose editorial column in the other major newspaper. So now I spend more time writing and researching than I do with my NGO work. Happily, there are others to pick up the slack.
My biggest lesson? Writing a clear, well-argued editorial is hard. But writing a clear, well argued editorial that leads people to stop me in the streets and thank me for raising the issue is incredibly rewarding. Sometimes they agree with me, sometimes they don't. I don't care about that. I just want them to think.
If my columns were ever put behind a paywall, I'd just post them on my own site for free (well, actually, I do that anyway). Limiting exposure to such material is, in my opinion, cutting off your nose to spite your face.