For anyone watching the print and online media organisations, it’s clear that change is in the air. Printed newspapers, struggling to compete against a tide of web based news agencies that deliver their content for free and update regularly, are having to change their business models in order to survive. Many have shut down completely, while others have cut back on the number of journalists or reduced the number of editions. Many cities in the United States have woken up to no longer having a local newspaper covering local issues. As advertising revenues fell during the economic slowdown, the writing was on the wall.
But of course, you know this already. It’s all well documented, well understood well publicised. We get that media in general is having a hard time of late. We appreciate it, feel sorry for them, but move on.
News Corporation: expanding the use of paywalls
There is one interesting nugget to the tale though. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is looking at monetising it’s news organisations. This means that much like you’d pay for a newspaper, you’d pay to access content on their website. While this itself is nothing new – the model is already used on the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, the spread to other more mainstream publications is interesting. By their very nature though, mainstream content has more news agencies devoted to it. Given the choice, I suspect most readers would prefer their generic news to be free rather than having to fork out for it. This leaves media in a rather precarious position – what is it that they produce that readers feel is worth paying for?
For me it’s tied in to the magazines I read, the websites I browse and the podcasts I watch or listen to. I rarely if ever by a newspaper these days – almost all the latest information can be reached on my iPhone as I’m heading in to work, and I can even tailor it to my interests. For me the real value of a journalist isn’t being first with the news, it’s about having a unique opinion or a novel insight on things. It’s about being able to share your opinions and insights with an anonymous reader in an engaging and clear manner, all the while being able to reason your thoughts with facts and examples. For me it’s also the one thing that doesn’t decay with time. A journalist’s thoughts at that moment, captured on a page, are worth preserving.
Which brings me neatly round to the second half of this topic, the crowdsourcing project known as Wikipedia. Over the years, the world’s biggest online encyclopedia has needed to develop content policies in order to avoid promoting hoaxes and hosting inaccurate and in some cases libellous material. The key policy in this case is regarding the verifiability of information:
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the material may be removed.
This means that almost every Wikipedia article has references at the bottom of it so that readers can verify what the article states. Being an online encyclopedia, many of these references are online sources that have previously been vetted for accuracy and reliability. They almost act as referrals, taking readers from the encyclopedia article to the reference material used to make it. It’s at this point where the idea of news agencies using paywalls to charge and gate access to their content, breaks the process of creating and updating articles.
Wikipedia relies on volunteers in order to produce and maintain articles, and while they’ll happily donate their free time, it’s fair to say that producing good quality new content is a lengthy process and hard work. Once you start asking these volunteers to fork out for subscriptions to publications in order to research a story, several things may start to occur. The most obvious one is that the charging organisations get fewer citations in encyclopedia articles, leading to fewer referrals and fewer page impressions. A more subtle effect though is subjective bias creeping in to articles, particularly if those media organisations that elect to charge have a similar political leaning. There’s also the reduction in volunteer workforce if only some of them are able to afford to maintain online media subscriptions and yet have the free time to work substantially on article content – it adds a tilt on a formerly level playing field. Finally, there’s this whole verifiability aspect – how can a casual reader verify a fact if the source material is hidden behind a digital subscription?
At the end of the day, I feel emotionally that erecting a wall around content is somewhat of an anathema to me. It breaks the foundation of being able to freely construct webs of linked pages that take a reader on a journey from one website to another. It hearkens back to a darker age of the Internet when walled gardens, content portals and gateways were the modus operandi instead of the open access service we have today. More than that though, it means that there are creative, insightful people out there whose opinions I will never read. Not because I’ll never stumble upon their work, but because their work will be squirreled behind a paywall beyond my sight.