The Partisan Rant and Why Paywalls Suck

Backstory

Back around Thanksgiving, right when I was starting to plan out this class theme of News and the Age of Information, I remember hearing that Rupert Murdoch wanted to delist all of News Corporation's holdings from Google and put them behind some kind of paywall. To which I immediately said, "Awesome. If that keeps Joe Average from reading [un]Fair and [un]Balanced Fox News on teh Intarnets, score one for the world.

And before everyone goes off the handle calling me a pinko leftist commie, lemme say this: While I may disapprove of most conservative politics, I have no problem with conservatives. I DO however have a big problem with partisan news labeling itself "Fair and Balanced." You can't be fair and balanced and push a Republican agenda at the same time. And this is a long standing problem (dating back to Walter Lippmann's journalistic revolutions in the 1920s) with news media--they claim objectivity, but party politics always sneak in. My advise: broadcast your bias, and be proud of it; let the readers decide whether you're right or not. Hiding behind a mask of objectivity makes you look like a douchebag when someone (like George Carlin on O'Reilly) calls you on it.

On an increasingly off-topic parallel, Michael Lind posted this about the growing problem of political media pundits on cable news. His problem: "Most of the representatives of progressivism you see on TV are not really progressives. They are what might be called 'Democratists.' Most publicly prominent conservatives are not principled conservatives at all. They are 'Republicanists.' With the problem being more or less not the political spin, but rather the fact that these pundits spend their time defending their respective parties' actions, rather than actually preaching/believing/acting according to their political affiliation.

So perhaps moreso than a lack of journalistic responsibility in being forthright with your political bias, perhaps the pundits, as described by Lind, are the real downfall in newsmedia.

But I Digress

All of News Corp's holdings haven't yet fallen behind the paywall scheme kicked around by Murdoch in November (though the Wall Street Journal is already there). So for the time being, we can still celebrate the relative freedom as net surfers to choose just about any media-outlet-online-news-poison we want. But, as of Monday, this News Corp talk of Paywalls seems to be a growing fad. I caught this article in the New York Magazine about the good old New York Times starting to reconsider its current situation and undo the free state of the newspaper that's existed since 2005 when they realized no one wanted to pay for electronic subscription (the 2005, sorry, charging you was a bad idea letter to the readers is here). So here's their reasoning:

The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that, Nisenholtz and others believed, would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. (The nytimes.com homepage, for example, has sold out on numerous occasions in the past year.) As other papers failed to survive the massive migration to the web, the Times would be the last man standing and emerge with even more readers. Going paid would capture more circulation revenue, but risk losing significant traffic and with it ad dollars. At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: "At the end of the day, if we don't get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system."

While I understand the need for any business to want to push forward, turn a profit, and stick around, I have a hard time buying into the idea that some sort of "metered system [similar to the one] adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe" is the way to go.

When I search for news online, I like to browse headlines. Some days I won't get much deeper than headlines, others, I'll drill through several articles. The second that some form of paywall stops me, I'm gone. News isn't that important for me to buy an account--especially when I know that I can probably find something similar elsewhere, or as a last resort, use my university account to pull it out of a newspaper database from the school's library site. While every news source will have a different take on the news, there are certainly enough out there that are still free. Drop one behind a paywall, and another online paper that's free gets a spike in traffic. I see Salon, Huffington Post, Smoking Gun, and The Drudge Report all making out like kings from this.

Sharing is Caring

One of the big cornerstones of the net today is the ability to share. Almost every site of any import has connectivity links to all major social media outlets (facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc), in addition to aggregators like Digg. If you block something behind a paywall, you just shut down all the additional traffic you're netting through social media. Why throw away potential readers? That sounds suspiciously like something Verizon would do (damn the customers, damn the employees, worship the profits).

However, all my whining and reactionary thinking against this paywall idea will mean nothing short of ranting unless I offer something up to remedy the situation. One of the best things I learned about whining is that people tend to accept your whining a little more if you try to pair your problem up with a solution. Back in my Verizon days, it united our department, when my boss made us carry around little notebooks that said "issues" on one side and "resolutions" on the other. We couldn't bitch word one until we had thought up some sort of resolution to the problem we had. But with resolution in hand, we had the floor. So, I've gone on and bitched for several paragraphs about this whole paywall idea. Here's my solution: If you want to generate revenue of some sort off of your online news content, and somehow advertising isn't cutting it, take a note from the music industry (and I don't mean those assholes over in the RIAA. I mean NIN, Radiohead, Madonna, Oasis, and all the other musicians who've cut their record company ties and gone solo), and put up a tip jar. When In Rainbows came out in 2007, Wired.com estimated that Radiohead pulled in as much as $10M on their CD, where they allowed fans to set their own price for the album (Van Buskirk). (I payed £10 for my copy, btw.). In any event, letting users contribute what they can when they can, still generates revenue, but it also generates respect and follows along with the sense of "giving back" (isn't that one of the great buzz words of the times?) to something you believe in. Sure, you won't be raking in bucketloads of cash, but for intangible content that people can already get for free, what more can you ask for than a tip?

New York Times, you have some good content. I've used your articles before in essays, but if you ask me to pay, I'll go away, and I won't be the one crying the river. I still have my Slashdot, BBC, and Salon (which I did start reading more regularly as opposed to what my last blog entry said [at the very least, I put its headlines on my iGoogle homepage]).