The New York Post is reporting that the New York Times is going to ditch its paywall, making all of its new content freely available to the world. The rumor comes a week after rumors that Rupert Murdoch is considering doing the same with the Journal.
It’ll be interesting to see how long Salon and The Economist can soldier along with a paywall/daypass model. They’re both excellent publications, yet I hardly ever visit them because the blogs I read hardly ever link to them. My sense is that they’d be significantly more prominent if they had gone free a few years ago.
Hat tip: Yglesias, who concludes that the Internet will “make being an important opinion writer less financially lucrative, relative to other professions, than it once was.”
Slashdot reports on a new flashlight that makes subjects puke when you point it at them.
A Slashdot commenter says:
Just browse a few pages on myspace…you’ll get a similar nauseating effect.
One of my favorite podcasts is Slate’s Political Gabfest, a weekly show in which Slate writers discuss the week in politics. This week’s show [MP3] features Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and Newsday’s Jonathan Alter bashing Rupert Murdoch and wringing their hands over his takeover of the Wall Street Journal. Slate foreign editor June Thomas, who has what sounds like a British accent, responds by accusing Alter and Weisberg of snobbery and defending what Murdoch has done to the Times of London:
The Times was read by 100,000 old boffers, who mostly got it for the crossword… It was from another century—from the 19th Century, not the 20th Century. It didn’t have TV listings because it was too refined for that. Britain has changed. Britain is a more democratic country. You don’t need papers for the tofts any more. It’s not even the most conservative paper. It’s not the worst paper by any means. It’s not the worst of the broadsheets. I wouldn’t read it. But I think the fact that four times as many people read it now despite the way that newspaper circulation is declining everywhere in the world. He’s a good businessman. I think there is a lot of snobbery in the way that people are attacking him. I think that as long everyone is very vigilant about his interests—which are media interests, not armaments or supermarkets—I am not terribly worried about Rupert Murdoch.
I’m not sure what “boffers” and “tofts” are, but I think she makes a good point. One of the fundamental premises of the elitist argument Thomas is criticizing here is that there’s a fundamental tension between good business and good journalism—that the job of a newspapers owner (which Weisberg calls its public trust) is to forego maximizing profits in the name of good journalism. But this, it seems to me, demonstrates a myopic attitude toward business and a paternalistic attitude toward readers. Because it rests on the assumption that practicing good journalism is not a good business strategy. And the reason it’s not a good business strategy, presumably, is that readers don’t really want to read good journalism, but journalists must force-feed it to them like children eating their vegetables.
Now certainly, there are some papers that become successful by pursuing a less educated audience using dumbed-down, sensationalistic news coverage. But I don’t see how that would be a good business strategy for the Journal. The Journal has 2 million daily readers precisely because they produce the kind of in-depth, high-brow news coverage that the nation’s business elites demand. It’s not like the highly educated readers who pay almost a dollar a day for the paper aren’t going to notice if the paper’s quality starts to suffer as a result of cost-cutting.
More generally, I’m not sure I like the notion that the job of journalism is to force-feed readers information they otherwise wouldn’t be interested in. You can fill the newspapers with all the high-quality, in-depth reporting you like, but if a reader isn’t interested, he’s still going to flip to the sports section. So if dumbing the news down a little bit at least gets readers to read some news, I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing.
e-gold has always been an interesting company – an alternative value-transfer system that’s not attached to government currency because it’s backed by gold. The payments business charges much more than my gut tells me the service should cost; any competitor in this market should be welcome. And I’m no expert in monetary policy, but I know that fiat money (“this has value because the government says it does”) is dangerous because it relies on the credibility of the government that issued it, and because governments regularly inflate their fiat currency by printing or minting more of it. This diminishes the value of the currency in our hands.
But money is a sensitive area – governments are pretty protective of their prerogatives – and e-gold hasn’t always done such a good job making the case for itself. Suspicions about the use of this service may have culminated recently in an indictment against e-gold officials alleging conspiracy to launder money and various regulatory infractions, which met with a strenuous response from them.
Now e-gold is going to tell it’s story, putting a human face on what they’re trying to do. No, it’s not this video. They’ve started a blog. It should be interesting and educational. I’m listening to an interview with e-gold’s Chairman, Douglas Jackson, right now.
The idea of an asset-backed, non-governmental value-transfer system is very attractive to me, and an indictment is not a conviction. I think it’ll be worthwhile to get e-gold’s side of the story, and they definitely need to tell it in Washington, D.C.
Relatedly, Ingram has an interesting post on whether Rupert Murdoch should make the Wall Street Journal‘s website available for free:
I know that many newspapers have looked to the Journal as a model for what a paper can do online, because it is one of the few that has charged for its content from the very beginning and built what appears to be a successful business doing so. But does it make sense now? This Wall Street Journal story notes that Murdoch commissioned a study that looked at what going free would mean for the paper, and from that he concluded that while readership would grow by a factor of 10, advertising would likely only grow by a factor of five, and the loss of subscription revenue would effectively make the whole thing a wash. In other words, maybe’s it’s not worth it.
It’s not clear whether the study looked at the short run or the long run, but it seems to me that if the short-run financial outcome is anywhere close to a wash, then it’s stupid to keep the paywall. Because the biggest harm a paywall does is dramatically limit a site’s long-term growth potential. People who currently like the Journal enough to pay for it will likely keep doing so. But given the massive amount of information out there, most people just leaving college are likely to opt for one of the Journal’s free competitors.
Moreover, being free brings a wealth of ancillary benefits that don’t show up in the bottom line right away. As a blogger, I almost never link to stories behind paywalls because I can usually find a free version of the same story. My impression is that other bloggers tend to act the same way. So as the blogosphere becomes an increasingly important source of traffic, paywalls will become more of a liability. If Murdoch can eliminate the paywall and completely replace the lost revenue with ads, that seems like a no-brainer to me.
Via Matthew Ingram (I’m catching up on RSS feeds), Jack Shafer has makes an important observation about today’s prestige newspapers: their staffs are significantly larger than in the glory days of the 1970s. Although Shafer’s original piece overstated the case, the numbers are still significant: The New York Times has apparently grown from 500 reporters and editors to 750, while the Washington Post has grown from 340 to 550. In other words, each is about 50 percent larger than it was in the 1970s.
Shafer then quotes Post and Times officials explaining why news would suffer from a reduction in headcount to 1970s levels. Apparently fluff stories are bigger revenue drivers than they were in the 1970s, so the hard news headcount would have to be cut below 1970s levels to keep the paper profitable.
But I think this dramatically underestimates how much easier a reporter’s job is today than in the 1970s. There’s a wealth of original materials available online that makes fact-checking easier. There’s a massive distributed reporting system called the blogosphere that helps reporters dig up leads and provide instant feedback. There are people all over the place with cell phones capable of capturing photos and even video. There are sites like YouTube and Flickr that help aggregate and organize this wealth of material.
Obviously, there are still some stories where there’s no substitute for picking up the phone and calling sources, or for hopping on a plane to see a story first-hand. We still need some reporters to do that. But the job of a reporter these days is far more oriented toward synthesizing and summarizing the material that’s already out there. Much of the information is already out there, and the job of a reporter is simply to translate sometimes technical source documents into plain English.
Moreover, one of the points Shafer make is that the Times and the Post relied far more on wire stories in the 1970s than they do today. There’s no reason to think there’d be much loss in story quality if reporters did more of this today. The Times could cut its staff covering technology and instead feature content from CNet or Wired (obviously, they’d want to feature some of CNet’s less geeky or esoteric content, but I’m sure CNet would be happy to produce some less-geeky stories to accommodate them). Many large web properties already do this, but there’s every reason to think this process could continue without significantly harming the quality of news coverage.
The next decade may bring wrenching adjustments for reporters used to secure positions at large newspapers, but there’s little reason to think that the quality of news will suffer as a result. Quite the contrary, thanks to the Internet, the average American has access to far more and better news than he did 20 years ago. Any diminution of the quality of newspaper reporter will be small compared with the benefits of being able to choose from dozens of high-quality news sites.
Last week, my side-project WashingtonWatch.com announced a content partnership with PR Newswire. Press release here.
PR Newswire has taken a sitewide sponsorship of WashingtonWatch.com, and it will now distribute federal legislative updates from WashingtonWatch.com, giving the site even greater visibility to media and online audiences worldwide.
It’s a terrific pairing: PR Newswire will have increased access to the policymakers and engaged citizens who visit WashingtonWatch.com, and WashingtonWatch.com will grow even more prominent as a clearinghouse of legislative information for the media.
Smart comments on the death of newspapers from Ezra Klein:
The heyday of newspapers had them operating amid a scarcity of information. The average citizen in Omaha, Tallahassee, or even Los Angeles simply couldn’t collect information from DC or Nairobi, couldn’t call up yesterday’s presidential speech, couldn’t choose from thousands of content sources and millions of blogs and dozens of cable news channels. Newspapers, due to their wide array of reporters, their investment-heavy text transmission infrastructure, and their near-monopolies in individual markets, added a ton of value in getting consumers information they couldn’t otherwise access. That’s changed.
Now information is abundant, even too abundant. What readers need is interpretation, filters, guides. The media — dare I say it? — needs to mediate. That’s where they can add the value. The basic stenography that was valuable in one age isn’t worthless in this one, but it’s simplistic, and not nearly enough.
Further, we’re not merely dealing with an era in which information has become overwhelmingly abundant, we’re caught in a moment when all sides have become exquisitely sophisticated at spinning it, at publicizing what they want heard, distorting what scares them, drowning out what hurts them, discrediting what attacks them. So not only is there too much for the average consumer to deal with, it’s not even clear what they should deal with, what’s honest, who can be trusted. This is dicier territory, of course, but I think those who fret over the newspaper’s capability to serve this guiding function give insufficient thought to how odd the concept of objective news coverage has always been, and how much more potential there was for abuse when there was nearly no in-market competition.
And Matt Yglesias:
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.