Newspaper sites - free versus subscription
There’s an interesting article over at Wired suggesting that the Wall Street Journal is in danger of becoming irrelevant because it charges people to view its articles online.
Because you have to subscribe to access both current news articles and the archive, the Journal is leaving only a faint footprint in cyberspace… I googled “Enron” — an issue the Journal covered exhaustively, and which two of its reporters even wrote a book about — and not one article appeared within the first 25 pages (250 results.)
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Since most people refuse to pay for WSJ stories, most bloggers are reluctant to link to them. It also has an impact on anyone who uses the web for research — and there are a lot of us. As importantly, the next generation of readers is growing up by accessing news over the internet, and one place they are not surfing to is WSJ.com. With their habits being formed now, there is little chance the Journal will become part of their lives, either now or in the future.
I think there’s definitely something in this argument, and I wish the Independent would take note. I often buy the paper and read something that I think is worth mentioning here (I think their coverage of the Iraq war has been particularly good), but since they’ve started charging for access to lots of their articles, I usually end up instead linking to similar pieces at the Guardian, their rival, who don’t charge. I wonder, now that online advertising revenues are supposedly picking up, if the subscription model really does benefit the paper more than the expanded readership and profile that free access funded by advertising brings about. Maybe a decent compromise would be to charge for access within the first two days of an article appearing, then make it freely available after that.
Hm, that’s an interesting option. I’m doing a paper for my online journalism class on this subject, and yes advertising has definitely been picking up a lot more speed than subscriptions. It’s just so sad that media has to be so driven by advertisements. If newspapers depend on advertisers for revenue, (thus forcing papers to write for advertisers and not readers) how will the real news ever be reported?
I completely agree. Even the quality papers seem to have more and more inane ‘lifestyle’ features to appeal the advertisers’ target demographics nowadays. How much influence they have over the news content I don’t know, but what advertiser wants their product pictured next a disturbing photo of a starving child or article about war atrocities?
We’re even seeing adverts creeping into personal blogging; with Google AdWords serving up ads based on the page content, will we start to see some bloggers bearing this in mind when they write? That would be a real shame, as to my mind the point of blogs is to enable people to express thoughts and opinions free of the usual commercial constraints.
On the other hand, I think quality news reporting is too important to only be available to those with plenty of spare money, so some sort of compromise is inevitable.
Sadly we live in an age where if it doesn’t move, some marketing genius will try to stick an advert on it.