Sometime the online discussion about content paywalls makes me despair of my profession. There seems to be a strong element of the journalistic community that just want to stick traditional journalistic content behind a paywall, and suddenly journalism's problems will go away.
This is madness.
I'm not suggesting that paywalls don't have a place in publishing businesses. After all, I work for a publisher that makes more than half its revenue online - and some of that is generated by paywalls. But the path to that point has taught us many things about making money online, and one of those is that just shoving traditional content online is not the way to go - especially if you're going to stick a paywall around it. Indeed, I find it amusing that I spend half my week helping build free-to-air content around a very successful paywalled site, just as others are getting rid of free content.
However, too many of the pro-paywall arguments have, to me, the ostrich-like quality of sticking your head into the sand of traditional media, whilst ignoring the developments that have happened elsewhere on the web for the last decade. Believing that paywalls will save the day requires an interesting combination of hubris and myopia such as that on display in Tim Luckhurst's piece on Comment is Free today. The penultimate paragraph made me laugh out loud:
This is madness.
I'm not suggesting that paywalls don't have a place in publishing businesses. After all, I work for a publisher that makes more than half its revenue online - and some of that is generated by paywalls. But the path to that point has taught us many things about making money online, and one of those is that just shoving traditional content online is not the way to go - especially if you're going to stick a paywall around it. Indeed, I find it amusing that I spend half my week helping build free-to-air content around a very successful paywalled site, just as others are getting rid of free content.
However, too many of the pro-paywall arguments have, to me, the ostrich-like quality of sticking your head into the sand of traditional media, whilst ignoring the developments that have happened elsewhere on the web for the last decade. Believing that paywalls will save the day requires an interesting combination of hubris and myopia such as that on display in Tim Luckhurst's piece on Comment is Free today. The penultimate paragraph made me laugh out loud:
The internet is a valuable tool. It can bring inspiring, diligent and creative reporting into every home. But it will not do so by obliging consumers to accept the shoddy, propagandist ranting some categorise as citizen journalism and less credulous critics recognise as a deplorable reversion to the days when news was always deployed as a political weapon and only occasionally reported.Mr Luckhurst seems blissfully unaware that he has just produced - in that self-same paragraph - a piece of "shoddy, propagandist ranting".
To dismiss the whole of the free-to-air reporting, analysis and
news-gathering being done on blogs and the myriad forms of social media
that exist in that one paragraph is to duck the crucial question of
"what do you offer that's so much more compelling than the work done on
free content". Worse than that, it shows a worrying ignorance of the
material and work that is being done by the amateur and the
entrepreneurial professional in the field of online journalism.
Research is meant to be a crucial part of journalism, and it had better
be part of any business plan. There's no research here, just prejudice
and, I suspect, fear.
He also makes the normal spurious pleas to democratic nobility - through some sort of reporting elite, ironically - that are trotted out again and again. And I think to myself "I've seem more genuine holding of local politicians to account by local bloggers in south-east London than I have by the local newspaper".
Even Johnston Press admits it's just testing the water here. It's going to take more than a paywall to save us from the shifts in the information ecology around us.
Update: A few minutes after I posted, I saw this. May I suggest that it's just further evidence of the disconnect between the perceived value of the local press and the often tawdry reality?
He also makes the normal spurious pleas to democratic nobility - through some sort of reporting elite, ironically - that are trotted out again and again. And I think to myself "I've seem more genuine holding of local politicians to account by local bloggers in south-east London than I have by the local newspaper".
Even Johnston Press admits it's just testing the water here. It's going to take more than a paywall to save us from the shifts in the information ecology around us.
Update: A few minutes after I posted, I saw this. May I suggest that it's just further evidence of the disconnect between the perceived value of the local press and the often tawdry reality?
