In a recent post at Second Rough Draft, he doesn't say "abandon them entirely," but does say that most papers that aren't "national," ie, WaPost, NYT, WSJ, and maybe the LAT, should pretty much abandon them, starting with this thought:
Where paywalls work: Broadly speaking, I think we now know that paywalls work only when a publication is producing high quality content in high quantity. This is the through-line from the Wall Street Journal (the earliest major adopter) to the Financial Times (where the idea of the meter was developed) to the later-adopting but now very successful New York Times and Washington Post among newspapers and Atlantic and New Yorker among magazines.
He goes on to add:
Relatedly, the problem for the vast majority of metropolitan newspapers is that while many continue to produce high quality content on occasion (their best stories are in many cases their best ever), they do not now do so in sufficient quantity to attract a large enough group of paying digital subscribers. (The average Gannett or Lee chain paper, for instance, has about 6000 paying digital subscribers. That’s not enough to make this economic model work in the long term.)
But, he doesn't address the issue of paywall development and history, by and large, outside these national sites.
For instance, the Dallas Snooze, after its CueCat failure, went through two different paywall iterations before hitting on a third.
My answer?
As I said in comments there, Counterpunch recently added a Counterpunch+ set of paywalled stories. It's no more than 15 percent of its total, so in Teufel's terms, it's NOT "quantity." So effing what? I think the idea is great. Regional daily papers could and should do similar, with a harder paywall on the "quality" stuff. You get NONE of that free, while getting your five free monthly peeks at other stuff only.
Otherwise?
Some money is better than none, and as long as the paywall money isn't costing yet more ad money? Some money is better than none.
He then goes Joe Biden:
There are big equity issues here: Paywalls are ultimately for richer people. Journalists may be willing to pay for a passel of digital subscriptions, but most civilians don’t feel like they have the money to do that, even if they have the time. To put some numbers on this, fewer than one out of five Americans pays for online news, and the median number of subscriptions among that group is two.
When you target high income and wealth in this country, unfortunately you end up with an audience that is disproportionately white, while Black and Latino people are underrepresented. That is especially problematic in our cities, where paywalls therefore have the effect of furthering the historical pattern of underserving these communities, even when they represent a majority of residents.
Sorry, not buying it.
Back when print was print, some community papers offered a senior citizen discount, and that was it. AFAIK, Black and Hispanic papers, as well as mainstream ones, didn't ask your socioeconomic class, and the advertisers that made the bulk of the paper's profits didn't ask, either. Just if you had money, period. And, he's been around long enough to know that.
Then, there's this:
Bigger subscriber revenues have costs as well as benefits: Paywalls have been great for the businesses of the news organizations that have the largest number of paid online subscribers, especially as print advertising has continued its secular decline and the platforms have monopolized digital advertising. But the growing economic dependence of these publications on their readers is having increasingly troublesome editorial consequences.
This dependence, I think, is the principal source of the rising tide of consumerist features and the increasing celebration of luxury items and trends. Even worse, at least in my view, is what I am starting to see as a reluctance to challenge readers’ preconceptions, even when those may not be deeply rooted in fact. What is sometimes denigrated as “political correctness” is often, I fear, actually a reluctance to discomfit paying subscribers.
As I asked semi-rhetorically in a comment, is that any different or any worse than 20, or even 30 or more years ago, newspaper publishers being afraid of editorial content pissing off a major advertiser, even as it was claimed the wall between editorial and advertising was as high as Jefferson said the church-state wall should be?
I doubt it. Beyond that, pissing off a "class" is different than pissing off one individual company.
You want papers to be like Vox, or something, then, pandering to venture capitalism? Being even worse than the NYT's consumerist stories?
Finally, there's his hinting about community papers.
As I told him in comments, without mentioning a Tex-ass community newspaper group like Jim Moser's by name .... the paywall there should be even firmer. Just like the WSJ, but no exception. You see 50 words, if that, including the headline, period. And, that's what you see at the start, not a slowly descending gray screen which can still be beaten at times by Apple-A + Apple C.
No comments:
Post a Comment