Matthew Ingram has a great write-up on the question of paying for news. Will people do it? Do paywalls actually generate revenue for traditional newspapers? The sobering answer is, not really—unless you are the New York Times. From the article:
“Take Gannett, for example. The newspaper chain is the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. as measured by circulation, with more than 81 daily papers, and it has been betting heavily on paywalls to drive additional revenue at its various properties. So after two years or so of trying to push its paywall strategy, how many of Gannett’s newspaper readers have been convinced to sign up for digital access? According to Mutter, that number is a little over 2 percent.”
Anecdotally, I can tell you that ever since the Toronto Star, my local daily, out up their paywall, I have visited their website maybe once. They’ll give you eight free articles a month, but if you are checking the news on shared computers—at work, for instance—you can burn through your free 8 in about as many minutes. More troublingly for the Star, the one resource they do have that I have been willing to pay for—their Star Dispatches ebook subscription series—is potentially on my chopping block too. One of the reasons I began subscribing was that I would visit their website for the bread and butter news, see ads for the ebook of the week and be interested to read it. Now that I don’t visit their website, I don’t see those ads, so I feel like I could cancel the service, save myself a buck a week, and not miss it.
I’ve heard, through the grapevine, that the Star has seen a massive decline in website visitors since their paywall went live—and a small uptick in print subscribers, to everyone’s surprise. Maybe that’s the effect they were going for. But the news critic quoted in Ingram’s article makes the point that if you compare even the Times with something like Netflix, there is no contest. Netflix is 80% more successful. That suggests that people will pay for content—of the right kind. They’ll pay for entertainment, not news.
They would pay for news, but they don’t get it. They get propaganda and lies. They get editorial slants wrapped up in too much dull ink. Dull boring s**t we know isn’t true. We’re not getting adequate and honest coverage of the Snowden revelations; that’s cherry-picked. The coverage on Syria is US government approved and substandard; just read the appendix to the UN report out on the Syrian CWs. Climate change is politicized to everyone’s detriment; any idiot can read the full IPCC AR5 released today and realize the Summary for Policy Makers last week lied about the science. No public discussion about our murder-for-fun drone program; we like picking off women and children in a video game with real bombs. And no one can write a correct or searing word about Israel without the delegitimization and anti-semitic labels tagged onto a holocaust hurl from tedious rich people, who then order the destruction of careers and reputations.
That’s why newspapers don’t know the mood in this country. That’s why people went digital for their source info. We’re being lied to.
We have a completely fictional fight going on in this country right now about the debt ceiling, while people don’t have jobs, their food stamps are getting cut, and they’re hurting. Not one of these million-dollar journos has asked the obvious question, because they obviously haven’t done step one of their economic homework. The debt ceiling was put in place (1917) to protect the gold supply, when we were on the gold standard. We’ve been off it domestically since 1934 and internationally since 1971. “Mr. Boehner, we issue our own fiat currency with a floating exchange rate since 1971. Explain why you’re enacting a law for a monetary system that no longer applies.” But no, our journalists and broadcasters run around bemoaning how we have to save the sun circling the earth.