Well, per Ken Doctor at Nieman
Labs, that’s a good description, because Ingram, a blind follower of the Three
Musketeers of Gnu Journalism (deliberately ripped off, with same snarky intent,
from Gnu Atheism) details several specific ways in which he and they are wrong.
And, yes, even some
non-dailies have paywalls. The light for dailies, definitely for smaller ones,
and possibly for mid-sized ones, is at least probably getting near to a
flattening out point.
Second, and directly related,
Doctor details the economics of paywalls. There’s a variety of ways to
skin the paywall cat. Most new adopters are going with fewer freebie reads
than, say, the New York Times, and also a lot less leakiness. That includes not
just small companies but as big a boy as Gannett. Doctor says opt-out provisions,
in which hardcopy subscribers are automatically charged at least a nominal fee
for digital access, are also growing. (I hate opt-out provisions in general,
including this one, but … the idea is, nonetheless, growing.)
But, even there, Doctor starts
with the US side of the equation:
By
the end of this year, figure that about 20 percent of the U.S.’s 1,400-plus
dailies will be charging for digital access. Gannett’s February announcement
that it’s going paywall at all its 80 newspapers galvanized attention; when the
third largest U.S. newspaper site, the Los Angeles Times, went paid (in March),
more nodding was seen in publishers’ suites.
But,
that’s his takeoff point to note that (as of March) more than a dozen European
dailies also had paywalls.
That,
then, leads to the more significant issue. Doctor notes most paywalls are
neither flaming successes nor flaming failures. So, why?
So
if charging for
digital access — a too long phrase, but one that’s most accurate
than paywall — is neither a panacea nor a tombstone on the way to the
inevitable, what is it? It’s a building block, and it’s a way to re-envision
the business.
And,
that’s a good point.
Isn’t
that type of creative thinking and re-envisioning what the Three Musketeers
laud?
Short
answer? Yes, as long as it’s done for free online.
That’s
because they deliberately practice a selective quoting of only one of two
sentences from Stewart Brand’s famous “Information wants to be free” comment:
On
the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The
right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand,
information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting
lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Note
carefully that first sentence.
Then,
also per Wiki, and partially reflected on its original link, there’s the
question about whether Brand meant free in terms of cost, or free in terms of
access.
That,
then, gets back to many critics of the Three Musketeers noting that two (Jarvis
and Rosen) are paid academics, and at public, taxpayer-funded universities, no
less, and therefore can easily afford to tell newspapers to let people be
online leeches. Until 2010, Shirky was at the public Hunter University, so
ditto on him. Let’s also not forget Shirky’s consulting for Libya’s former
strongman Moammar Gadhafi, and his naivete about how autocrats could use social
media to their own ends when queried about that consulting.
Update, May 3, 2013: I probably spoke too soon. 1Q 2013 numbers for most major papers show that hardcopy advertising continues to slump, and that digital advertising isn't (yet? ever?) offsetting it. Paywalls are adding some money, but they may be not much more than digital dimes, until (ever?) AP (and Reuters, and AFP) up their rates to Google et al, enough to force wire service news to be paywalled, too. And, Saint Warren of Omaha expects newspaper revenues to continue to decline, even though he became a buyer last year.