It seems like news sites in general are way behind the times. They took so long to take to the internet, and now they monetize with 1990s methods. So I think part of why they want to charge to read articles is because, for whatever reason, they are unable to monetize their online content in typical modern ways- even though it’s certainly doable. They managed to sell ads in papers but for some reason can’t figure it out online. The only sites I get pop ups and distracting hover ads and really busy junk on are old media sites. Maybe they are trying to copy porn sites but they are copying the wrong ones.
Ignoring one’s personal priority (and ignoring that the limits can usually be easily circumvented), it seems a real loss for society that self-supporting newspapers are dwindling away. Increasingly, Americans get their news from free blogs and rants … and get what they pay for. Competent journalism is a pillar of democracy, but requires money.
I’d rant instead about scientific articles, which often cost $25 each, and where that money doesn’t even go to the content providers.
Because someone along the line paid for the content to be created in the first place. As newspapers are less and less able to recoup those costs, the supply if quality information will keep dwindling.
I pay for The Times (the UK one), The Economist and the New York Times, each of which provides news coverage and commentary that cannot be replaced by free news sources.
I wonder how long The Guardian can remain free. Its publisher has lost more than £30m in each of the past 2 years.
To get around the “you have read all your free articles and now must pay” bit, just open up “in private browsing” with IE. I have no clue how to hack a straight pay site.
Yeah, while I don’t mess around with it I believe the FT has a free articles per month limit that is just governed by a cookie and can be circumvented. The WSJ has a “partial pay wall”, where a few articles are specifically free, but the overwhelming majority of the content is not.
It used to be WSJ had a deal with Google where clicks from Google News to a WSJ article behind the paywall would get Google News readers through the paywell. Through that mechanism you could actually read the entire WSJ by just searching in Google News for the WSJ article title, but that deal must have gone away because I don’t believe it works any longer, or it works for a much reduced set of articles.
The Times of London I believe is behind a full pay wall.
The paywalls of the FT, NYT, The Economist and others can be circumvented by using a search engine to find the article you want, then clicking through.
This is not an accident: paywalls are porous by design. Publishers want potential new readers to be able to read their content and to (hopefully) gain enough of an appreciation of it to eventually take out a subscription.
The Sun has also gone behind a paywall, similar to The Times. I think this could be the first cheap tabloid to do so in the UK. It may be a more difficult proposition to induce a tabloid audience into paying for online content that it could get for free elsewhere. The Sun also won’t gain the same corporate subscription market as picked up by quality publications such the FT, The Economist and WSJ.
They can demand all they want, I’m not paying.
The Guardian is in an unusual position in that Guardian Media Group losses aren’t the important thing; it’s the finances of the Scott Trust that count, and those are very healthy, after them recently selling their stake in Autotrader for £619m. That takes investment funds to around £850m, and they still have a stake in other businesses as well. Most newspapers would kill for that kind of backing.
Were this actually true, I’d pay. I refuse to pay for the bullshit disguised as news.
Very true, but while the Scott Trust has deep pockets I wonder whether it has the appetite to continue to support the current model of free access forever. The billionaire-owned Telegraph, The Times and Evening Standard could also be said to have huge parent-company resources (although not devoted to the same single-purpose as is the Scott Trust), but even wealthy shareholders want to soon enough stabilise their businesses.
None taken (I am not a journalist, I work in production). This is your opinion of course, but I wonder if you would be able to support it. If you take the year 2000 as a sort of watershed (at least in our case I know that’s when we started losing serious advertising revenue to the internet) what is your case that journalism in the 90’s was worse than journalism in the 70’s, say?
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It seems like news sites in general are way behind the times. They took so long to take to the internet, and now they monetize with 1990s methods. So I think part of why they want to charge to read articles is because, for whatever reason, they are unable to monetize their online content in typical modern ways- even though it’s certainly doable. They managed to sell ads in papers but for some reason can’t figure it out online. The only sites I get pop ups and distracting hover ads and really busy junk on are old media sites. Maybe they are trying to copy porn sites but they are copying the wrong ones.
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Our online site has one of the highest numbers of hits and separate viewers of news sites in the country. There are ads up the wazoo on every page (I have stopped using our own site as my home page because some of the ads slow things down too much and are too obtrusive). I’m not sure what other “modern” methods you would recommend, but I repeat that online advertising does not pay the bills. Do you have any actual experience to back up your assertions?
Sorry to be testy, but there is a lot of nonsense floating around about these kinds of issues, and sometimes they chap my hide.
I’m willing to pay for news; the question is, how much.
Several years ago, the NYT had a good chunk of their content behind a paywall. It cost something like $45/year to get unlimited access to the paywalled content, and I decided it was worth that much, and I accept the truth of the argument that someone has to pick up the tab for real journalism, so I paid.
Then they got rid of the paywall.
Then a couple of years ago, they created a new paywall. But even including the first four weeks for 99¢, the cost is now $180/year. Sorry guys, but I don’t read enough of the NYT to justify paying that much. If they had a cheaper option for fewer articles (but still more than the 10 free articles per month, obviously), I’d pay. But my options are $180 or $0, so I’m going with zero.
I don’t care that they charge. I’m not paying, though. Someone else will provide it for free. I just google the headline and find another site that I can read. Hasn’t failed yet.
I pay for online subscriptions, just as I did for Dead Tree versions (which I no longer need since the parrot died).
The Online NYT is read daily with my morning coffee, just as I did with the paper version. It is now cheaper and easier to read on the bus too.
Because they aren’t. Mostly what they are doing is repeating what some other site said without a paywall, or regurgitating word-for-word the release of some publicity department, parroting the official position of some govenrment, or otherwise providing garbage. The news has largely refused to “do its job” for decades.
I also read the electronic version of The New York Times. On the other hand, my father still subscribes to the paper version. (He gets a big academic discount.) Occasionally he will call me and recommend that I read a particular article, usually adding the exact location in the paper. (“It’s on the second column of page A4.”) I have to gently remind him that I’m reading the electronic version and I don’t see specific sections or pages.
Just to be clear here, it’s pretty much a fact that ads on the web do not generate enough revenue to sustain a non-pay news site?
Last night I went to read an article on Tech Times. The cooling fans on my laptop immediately fired up and the page hung. I looked at my adblock icon and it showed as having stopped 206 items on the page. I had to kill Chrome and start over. I wonder what on earth that site was doing. It’s happened before.
Several months ago the Seattle Times started charging to read more than a few articles a month, or something. I was annoyed until I realized I could just delete my cookies whenever I wanted and then they’d think I was a new reader and let me have unlimited access for two weeks.
I like to read it, so I’d consider paying if it was maybe a few dollars a month, but it’s a few dollars a week. I’m not paying that, that’s how much a physical newspaper costs. If I couldn’t get it free I’d just get my news from other sources.