dec 30, 2012

paywalls.

they're coming up on the most popular publications in canada in the new year, some of them are already in place, and it seems like the idea is expanding. i know a lot of people are saying they won't pay, and the papers are going to come out of this badly. while i agree, i think there are some other issues that should be addressed.

if anybody has this right, it's the new york times. they give you ten free articles a month throughout the site, then the paywall comes up. that means moderate users can get the odd article if they want it, but heavy users have to pay. yes, you can get around this very easily by deleting your cookies, but not everybody knows this; regardless of this way around the paywall, it is about as close to a fair proposal for a for-profit news site that i've yet to come across.

i've only had to delete my cookies once, and it was when i was reading up on paul krugman a little bit. but, i'd guess that, on average, i do read between five and ten articles at the new york times per month. it's not a great paper, and it certainly has a very right-of-centre bias, but it's also useful as a gateway: it's well known that they have contacts with government and that they consequently present a lot of propaganda in the way that the government *wants* you to interpret it. this is why i read those articles; while i know they're mostly full of bullshit, the strain of bullshit is "official bullshit", and understanding the official bullshit is often useful in piecing together what is actually not bullshit.

so, the new york times is worth reading. sometimes. is the toronto star worth reading? the globe and mail? it is by no means obvious that these papers contribute much of anything to any kind of worthwhile discourse, or provide much of any kind of information or analysis that isn't mirrored by the canadian press or even done incomparably better by our state-run media, the cbc.

it is really the cbc that is going to make these paywalls catastrophic to the newspapers putting them up. the cbc's mandate, which is most definitely not to generate profit, means that they will never be putting up paywalls. well, unless they change their mandate. so, if you just want the facts - something in syndication, something that explains events that have happened or are happening - then you have lost nothing when the paywalls come up. in fact, the cbc generally breaks stories before these papers do, and provides more detailed reporting, with better sources. might this even add a new level of appreciation for what the cbc does? perhaps, it might.

what's left is analysis and opinion. but, these papers do not excel at this, either. at best, their columnists write boring, uninformative and/or crude pieces that tend to talk (write) down to their audience; at worst, they skew and misrepresent facts to fulfill an agenda. who sets that agenda? see, this is where the paywall starts to come across as beneficial...

i'm not sure there's a columnist at the star or the globe that can remotely compete with the level of writing that is present in the blogosphere for free. so, if these blogs are free, and the papers present an inferior product, it would stand to reason that the papers should also be free. this is how things have been; this is the correct relationship, and the market will uphold it in the upcoming year. what is really being exposed here is the untenable nature of for-profit written media in the internet age, and the coming obsolescence of the field of journalism as a vocation.

this is actually progress! what does a journalist at the globe or star know about much of anything at all, other than how to compile sources and write at an eighth grade level so as to not lose a larger readership? what motives must this journalist succumb to in order to continue to write and be paid to do it? now, what does a professor with a blog know about the subject they teach? what motives might a professor have? which should be able to generate a higher asking price for an article? which should people be reading, if they want to know about a current topic?