I pit my local paper for putting up a paywall in the most incompetent way possible

The BBQ Pit
1

This is The Olympian, the only newspaper that publishes in my town, and pretty much the only source for local news since the Seattle papers and TV stations rarely make it this far south. For as long as I’ve lived in this area, the paper has been free to read online.

Until last week, when, abruptly and without any notice on the page or in the paper that I was able to find, it came to pass that clicking on any article produces an indismissable popup asking you to purchase a subscription for $10 a month, or subscribe to the paper edition. If you close the window, the browser immediately directs you back to the front page. I understand that print newspapers are a dying breed these days (one of the two major papers in Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer, discontinued its print edition a few years ago) and that they need to seek revenue wherever they can. It’s not the fact that they’ve gone to a pay-to-read model that bothers me so much, though it does bother me, in that makes it increasingly difficult for low-income people in this city, which we have a good deal of especially in the downtown area where the paper is headquartered. It’s not so much that, judging from the viewership numbers they post in their masthead, the online edition has lost close to 25% of its readership since the paywall went up (they had about 16,000 viewers yesterday versus an average 22,000 before the paywall went up), and that that can’t be good for their revenues even if they’re making some money from subscription sales. It’s not even that they did it with no advance notice.

It’s that they did it in the least competent way possible.

I don’t know the technical term for it, but the popup they’re using to sell the subscriptions (and redirect you away if you close it) is the same kind Wikipedia used last year when they “shut down” the site to protest SOPA. Meaning that, if you time it just right, all you have to do is press the Escape key after the article loads but before the popup appears, and you will have bypassed the paywall. Furthermore, the popup doesn’t even appear at all on the mobile version of the site, nor does it even appear when I use Dolphin browser on my smartphone to access the main site. I don’t have any browers other than IE on my desktop, so I can’t determine whether it appears when the site is accessed from those browsers, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it doesn’t. On top of all that, the Tacoma News-Tribune, which is owned by the same company and cross-publishes much of the Olympian’s content, has no paywall.

So basically, all that the paper has done is make it slightly more annoying for people to read their website, and alienated several thousand readers in the process. I’ve always liked the paper’s editorial slant, and they publish some very interesting pieces of local color from time to time (like this pair of articles by a Roman Catholic monk about the ways that science fiction addresses religion), but this is just the kind of fail that I can only respond to by slapping my forehead and asking “What were you THINKING?”

2

What were they THINKING?

Well, probably that they were creating an effective paywall. But they simply didn’t have the talent on board to do it right.

So you should probably keep your mouth shut and enjoy the news as best you can, until enough people “complain” and then they’ll get it done right.

I’ve seen other sites with this or other similar crappy work.

Now, how about THIS for an incompetently done pay wall (please, don’t go shouting this from the roof tops): The New York Times famously installed a pay wall about a year ago, and has allegedly tightened it up somewhat. (You could see some limited number of articles free before you had to start paying, and then after a few months I think they reduced the number of articles you can see.)

Or at least, they said they’re doing all that. Funny thing is, I haven’t noticed any restrictions at all! I read mostly the op-ed pieces and occasional other articles. I certainly read far more articles than I am supposedly allowed to read, and I’m never been blocked at all. If they have really installed a pay wall, as they claim they have done, I’m not seeing it. Now that’s an incompetent paywall! And yet, strangely, I Pit them not. It’s not my job to do quality assurance on their programming now, is it? :o

3

All the papers around here went to paywalls with a few free views. They all seem to work on cookies only, so if someone was to want to find a way around them, it would be pretty easy.

4

That’s what The Edmonton Sun did (and probably other papers in the Sun chain - haven’t checked). Yup - cookies only. Yup - **absolutely **trivial to circumvent in Firefox if you want to (I’m sure it’s just as trivial in other browsers as well; Firefox is the only one I play with).

5

They’re either incompetent (has already been addressed) or they want a porous paywall.

For people who aren’t inclined to break the paywall, but still want to read the newspaper, great, they get their $10/month.

But they still would rather you break the paywall than just leave altogether, because then they still get to spread their brand, ideas, and most importantly advertisements to you. Then you will probably go on and occasionally share or recommend their articles to your friends. The best marketing is word of mouth.

It’s pretty trivial to implement better access controls than the ones that most newspapers have in place - even the NY Times has a paywall that can be circumvented by small dogs. That lends credence to the theory that newspapers are knowingly trying out high-porosity methods first. Part of the business depends on your articles getting out to as many eyeballs as possible.

6

Paper, ink, printing presses, delivery vans, bundles of twine, payroll for pressmen wearing rectangular hats made of paper, turntables to spin headlines in old movies: all this overhead is eliminated by reading online while still exposed to advertisers. Don’t the advertisers pay enough to cover the internet version (honest, non-rhetorical question)? Is paid access to this supposed to subsidize and forestall the death of the print version?

Overall, I don’t mind this larger concept. I don’t ride the bus anymore, but I need the services of people who aren’t paid enough to buy cars, or who are graciously keeping the roads emptier by taking the bus. I pay school tax to support the education of my future enema nurse, etc., etc.

But who am I subsidising by keeping the print newspaper alive?

7

Ha ha! I just changed my firefox browser prefs to not accept cookies from a few paywall newspaper sites. I can now view everything there. Thanks for the tip!

8

The Charlotte Observer just started doing this too. I simply move on to another site. Our local TV affiliates all have sites for local news.

9

I don’t know about the Olympian, but the *New York Times *has admitted that they want a porous paywall.

It works because lazy people are willing to pay for easy access, while tech-savvy people can figure out the ways to work around the paywall – and it isn’t very difficult. So they keep both sets of readers while still making money. Supposedly it’s been very successful for the Times.

10

I would guess that browsing privately would work as well.

11

Has it occurred to you that when they finally slap up a firewall that’s secure, people like you will pay up, reasoning , “Well, I did get free for X months by circumventing that lousy first paywall, I’ll pay up now, I guess!”

My guess is they wanted a porous paywall!

12

Not very likely in my (regarding the Edmonton Sun’s) case. I like browsing several different news sites, but the Sun is sufficiently crappy that if they actually require me to put some effort or $ into reading their news, I’ll just skip it.

Seems to me that there is a cost-benefit tradeoff here. If you make it require money or effort to read your news, then your news d–n well better be worth the effort!

13

The LA Times went from $60 to $76 for IRL delivery without warning. I already thought that it was too expensive so sent the bill back with “cancel this subscription” written on it. We are still getting it delivered every morning, so I guess newspapers can’t figure out how to get things right in many ways!

14

I did something similar with a magazine subscription once. They kept delivering the magazine and after a few months I just ignored the strident payment demands. After a couple of years and after a particularly nasty demand, I phoned their office and told them I had instructed them to cancel a couple of years previously, and had not requested in any way the last two years’ editions.

They seemed seriously confused that I would not pay the ‘outstanding two years’ subscriptions’ and even demanded why I hadn’t made more efforts to cancel. I agreed to send them a letter telling them I wasn’t paying for what I hadn’t asked for and they stopped deliveries.

I suspect that some people eventually renew their subscription if the publisher simply ignores all requests to cancel. I guess I was in a stronger position since I had clearly paid for one year’s subscription - it was not a recurring subscription.

15

I wonder it that is why we keep getting magazines we never subscribed to - currently Predator and Rolling Stone, but also for a very long time House and Garden. I used to get bills for that one which I just threw away unopened - I suppose many people just pay the bills even tho they never actually subscribed to the magazine?

16

No, and yes, respectively.

The reporters, editors and so on. In print, advertising pays (or used to, anyhow) the cost of the paper. Your extra buck-per-copy is never and was never a major part of the paper’s operating budget. You are eyeballs, delivered to advertising, for which they pay a hefty sum, especially when they can be assured that the men reading the sports section will see their ad for jock itch powder and the women reading the home and garden section will see their ad for oven mitts and the people reading the travel section will see their ads for expensive cruises.

Online, ads pay a pittance, especially the CPM, lowest bidder, non-tailored ads most mid-sized and large papers slapped on to their poorly constructed, loud and hard to read web sites once they realized they needed to be there.

And because the entire business model relied on advertisers footing the bill, they saw their circulation dropping off (thus lowering what print advertisers were willing to pay) at the same time they were realizing that online ads pay pennies. Then they started looking around at where else money might come from. Some have gone non-profit and started looking for grants and donations. Some have gone free and hoped circulations would rise enough to get the ad dollars back. And some have decided that hey, since you READ the news maybe you’d like to PAY for the news too. But spreading the cost of good journalism across the actual number of subscribers at a newspaper, especially a small-town or even small-city paper, is a pretty big number of dollars-per-paper.