Over the past two years, many news sites have turned to virtual subscriptions as a monetary lifeline. With a global pandemic upon us, publishers and publishers are wondering if now is the time to backtrack and make their news free, at least temporarily.
Poynter business analyst Rick Edmonds discussed this with Kelly McBride, president of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership.
Edmonds: Two bloodhounds called me last week to comment on the newspapers (Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe) that have maintained their paywall for much of their coronavirus policy. This selection seems to me to be a real moral dilemma.
Traditional newspapers have an advertising imperative to generate revenue from paid virtual subscriptions. It may just turn out to be a matter of survival. But abandoning the paywall in times of crisis makes a comprehensive local policy available to the entire community, not just those who can pay.
You are the ethicist, what is to be done?
McBride: Journalism is a public service. Is it more physical care or food?
If you go to the hospital, they treat you and then figure out how to recover the cost. If you go to the supermarket, you are expected to pay for your food. Normally, the news is more like food, you can get it. in many positions and quality may depend on what you are willing to pay. But in times of crisis, the data is more like emergency room care.
As a must-have public service, bloodhounds will have to do anything to make their data available to those who may not be able to pay. If all your content is behind a paywall and you don’t do any of that, it’s hard to argue that your news is important for well-being.
An evolving global pandemic means other people want data updates from a local news provider every day, if not every hour, so they can make non-public decisions about how to respond, adding what to do if they get sick.
Here are some imaginable features for newsrooms that live or hope to live off the paywall someday.
Edmonds: Lots of smart advice there. Those to whom paywalls use some of those other tactics. The Boston Globe, for example, publishes loose specialized articles on its scientific news site STAT, with a small sign in the most sensible asking for a contribution. The Globe’s sister site, Boston. com, has a loose but rudimentary design. An organized series of links to other resources is also loose. But none of this provides the full extension of local paintings to the network paintings it serves.
The Globe and Los Angeles Times have several corporations in their selection to continue billing. The Tribune Publishing and Hearst newspapers have nearly all of their policies paid protected, including in the San Francisco Chronicle, on a subway the governor closed last week, before extending that order statewide.
On the other hand, major national newspapers and each and every newspaper in the chain I consulted offer their antivirus policy for free, adding those like The Denver Post, owned by the notoriously frugal Alden Global Capital. Each of their I Sampled sites had wonderful stories that I would need to know if I lived there.
All Gannett/Gatehouse newspapers will offer their coronavirus policy for free (some Gatehouse newspapers have been free).
The L. A. Times and the Globe are getting a massive setback from social media, and some, I mean, from their own editorial team.
They may regain their minds as the pandemic progresses. Certainly, they ask themselves this question every day.
Competing priorities will replace whether it lasts six months or more. I don’t know how.
McBride: Part of the challenge is logistics. Most newsrooms with paywalls use a provider and the responsiveness of these is unclear.
The cheapest ones are all or nothing and do not allow flexibility. The New York Times and The Washington Post have built their own paywalls and have a small army of engineers to make changes when necessary. (I learned this from our colleague Cheryl Carpenter, who runs our edition of the Knight-funded Table Stakes program. )
I love what The Dallas Morning News does. They made their coronavirus policy free. They have a note at the top of their online page asking other people to go to the newscast depending on the week. Then they have features of $2, $4 or $7 depending on the week. And editor Mike Wilson made a very short video that they showed me on the mobile site explaining their commitment. Your readers show love.
Paywall newsrooms that don’t gesture toward non-paying audiences would likely miss a brief window of opportunity to build buy-in and demonstrate the importance of their work. Consumers are rapidly acquiring data habits. If your potential audience spends two to three weeks in this crisis without seeing your work, they will simply be informed that they must live without it. content.
Edmonds: Great business point related to content control systems and other technologies. You can’t do more than your systems allow. Nor will it be the time to make big fixes, invest in capacity, or throw away the old and the old.
From our first conversations about this piece, I was struck by how you see the business case and the features and how little obsessed I am with the basic moral question. It is not a change of roles. Perhaps an intellectual fusion?
Invoking Poynter’s procedure for making moral decisions invented by our retired colleague Bob Steele and which you have continued to refine, is it fair to say that this applies here?
What serves readers, but also what serves thin hounds and, yes, what serves advertisers and the advertising and monetary side. My starting point for legacy data operations would be: please, please, please locate the time in the complicated weeks ahead for an ongoing discussion on how to find the right balance. And that goes for other problems just around the corner, like vacations.
I asked my colleague, writing coach teacher Roy Peter Clark, to give me a quick answer. By no means ignoring the imperative of existing events, his response: “If you are bankrupt, the wonderful journalism you were doing will not be available to anyone. “
Kelly McBride is senior vice president at Poynter and president of Poynter’s Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership. You can reach her on kmcbride@poynter. org or on Twitter at @kellymcb.
Rick Edmonds is the media analyst at Poynter. Se can be reached at redmonds@poynter. org.
As a consumer, one of the frustrating facets of managing paywalls is that there are so many. I look for headlines in an aggregator and mark the stories I need to read in detail, but when I look at them again, I find the prospect of 4 or five other paywalls, all vying for my money. I would pay a payment that would give me access, even for a limited number of articles, to various publications. The music industry has figured out how to collect royalties in a position and distribute them to artists based on the number of times their content has been used. Maybe the data industry can expand something similar. I have a free space from ASCAP or BMI for press articles.