Why do newspapers charge for yesterday's news?
The problem with the NYT's system is that it ensures that the Times can't be the paper of record any longer, because even if a thousand bloggers point to a great article on the day it comes out, thirty days later it will be invisible to the 99.999 percent of the Web who won't pay for access to fishwrap, no matter how interesting.Doctorow proposes that newspapers offer their archives for free and charge for today's news.
It's a great idea. The only way it's going to happen, though, is either for one agency to do it first and show great success, or for many agencies to all agree to do it at once. I can easily see them all having cold feet about completely reversing their model.
They shouldn't, though. The web is moving to a pay-per-service model, I believe. People are more than willing to pay for things they enjoy, such as webcomics.
The one big ethical dilemma I see here is that news is a very different commodity from entertainment. For all intents and purposes, people need to read the news. How, then, can we justify charging for it?
Of course, to that question there is always the answer: Well, we charge people for food, don't we?
2 comments:
We pay people for food because we don't care to grow it on our own farms for ourselves. We have other things to do. The food is grown by people that need money, processed by people that need money, and bought by people who have that money.
News is entirely different. Charging for "today's news" isn't right, unless you're paying for some form of work behind it. A newspaper - pay for that. You're covering ink and paper costs, as well as the cost for getting all that processed. But charging for news on the internet? That isn't right.
Look, if the news wants to retain its high and mighty WE DO THIS FOR THE PEOPLE ideal then they should do it for the people. Even if company X needs cash in order to report online, there's going to be a company Y out there that doesn't.
To the chagrin of your readers that despise the Fat Bastard Rush Limbaugh, I point towards his website as a good example of making money on news. Go to his site and read his articles for free. Turn on your radio for free and hear him talk. Pay him some money, and you can access video archives, other special "treats" for paying members, as well as being able to watch him live during his broadcasts.
If other news companies offered perks to those that "joined" their sites, then maybe more people would be willing to pay for their news. But the dumbed down "this is what happened" has always been and should remain free.
Way I see it, they charge you for archives because it takes webspace to maintain all that shit. And in my opinion, that is a much better operation than charging for today's news. If there's a news story you want to keep, then save it yourself - if you expect someone else to save it for you, you shouldn't be upset if you have to pay to see it.
Hell, if they did it like this guy's suggesting, those that couldn't afford it or didn't want to pay for it could simply wait a few days and read it anyway. There's no point. And there's always going to be someone else that isn't so enraptured by cash that'll report it the same day it happens.
By shifting to a pay-today strategy, news agencies and publications wouldn't be moving forward in the internet community, they'd be tucking their heads into their asses and taking a giant step backwards.
The internet provides a lot of things for free that you used to have to pay for. Charging for something as general as today's news isn't going to help anything - unless you simply want your company to go bankrupt.
-AJ
Well, this goes to show I shouldn't post while I'm at work :> I was thinking about two separate things at once, and ended up posting as if they were the same thing.
When Doctorow made his post, he implied that the NYT's "take" is valuable enough that people would want to pay for it. In other words, people would be paying for a certain type of journalism: the type they get from the New York Times.
In my morning stupor, I was thinking that this would be editorials, features, opinions, stuff like that. Stuff that is interesting and worth reading, but not necessarily time-dependent. If you read it today or tomorrow it wouldn't really make much a difference in your life.
Then there's the news that can't wait, like severe weather alerts, crime, things that will affect you and that you have a right to know about this very instant. I believe that sort of news, what you call the "dumbed down", "what happened" stuff, should remain free and readily accessible for everyone.
When I wrote my post I wasn't thinking too hard about it. But it has occurred to me that separating those things would be supremely difficult. As I have mentioned before, it's virtually impossible to eliminate bias from news reporting. What I was thinking earlier was that the bare, stripped news would be free, and the biased stuff would be subscription. Basically, you'd be paying the NYT to give you its opinion on current events. But now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not sure it would even be possible to divide the two.
I guess I was seeing the world through blog-colored glasses. There are bloggers out there who are paid to give people their opinions, via donations. I was thinking that news organizations could take a hint from that. But that leaves the very good question of where the actual news would come from.
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