Stop the free presses!
There will be changes coming next year in the world of online news. Come January, several news organizations who are currently allowing their stories to be viewed for free online, are beginning what is known as a “paywall,” meaning they will now be charging for said content.
Among the papers participating in this experiment in capitalizing on the previously ignored idea of a subscription-based online model, is the valley’s own, Recordnet.com. Their formal announcement yesterday sent Twitter and message boards into a frenzy with the main thrust of the arguments centering around the question of who, in fact, would pay for an online Record subscription. The second part of that debate questioned the amount of support the paper would lose by suddenly making it’s readers pay to read their stories.
As a former journalism student and a person who has many friends in the industry I fully understand and support paid content on the web. I realize that in this economy, advertising dollars are at a premium and words and ideas be them on paper or on a computer screen are valuable and should be compensated accordingly. So in theory, I can see the need to offer a paid online subscription to help curb the loss sustained by the sagging paper subscribers. More than that, I support it.
But…
Allow me to make this brief analogy before I continue.
Say you met this girl (or guy) and you hit it off great. After a few dates, you make your move and achieve an intimate relationship with person. Then after a few years…you fall in love. Maybe you get married, maybe you don’t, but you have a great and loving relationship nonetheless. Then after 12 years…she (or he) tells you she/he is a prostitute and from now on, you will have to pay for sex. “Wait…what,” you ask, “when did this happen and why are you bringing this up now?” Her excuse is that her body is too valuable to be giving it up for free anymore and that in order to continue your relationship, you’ll have to start handing over the dough.
Without the sex…this is what the newspaper industry is doing to the average news consumer next year. The Record is not to blame, rather their corporate officials and the industry as a whole should be ducking from all of the fingers wagging in their directions. For it was they who did not have the foresight to realize that maybe charging for their paper’s content from the get go would have been a wise move. People pay more than $35 dollars a month for some porn sites monthly subscriptions, stands to reason that asking them for $5 for their news every other week might get some nibbles. Just saying…
Really this is the perfect example of right idea…wrong time. If this were 1994 and a newspaper site was asking me to pay a few bucks to read a paper online, I might have been more apt to spare the change, but now that I have been enjoying news for free all of these years, I don’t think you can win my money. My purse strings are tight enough as it is without having to pay for what I am sure I will still be able to get for free somewhere else.
It’s not that I don’t support our local journalists or the work they do, but this is the type of opening in the old world school of media thought, that I as a new media student have been waiting for, so don’t think I won’t be making my play very soon to swoop in on some of those that may be turned off by the change of service from their favorite news source.
Other voices of interest in the matter:
