Pay wall or pain wall?

jes

jes

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Pay wall or pain wall?

"Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains." Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly wasn't thinking about the internet when he wrote those famous words in 1762, but they are increasingly appropriate.
 
It is probably fair to expect to pay for a digital copy of a paper that you would otherwise pay for. Although they don't have the sort of overheads and printing costs as the hard copy, you still need reporters. 20 articles should be good to keep advertisers and less frequent readers happy.
 
nelwa said:
soon most large newspapers will follow suit with their websites...
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Not necessarily. If the NYT (and other NewsCorp) sees a significant drop in readership, then they would not go the same route.

The problem with users paying for content, and being the major contributors, is that newspapers will print what sells. Therefore they will lean more and more in the direction of the readership, and can't stay objective any more. Will a newspaper with a majority-readership from a certain political background be able to publish articles critical of that background? Or will that simply kill them off? How can you trust a newspaper that panders purely to its readership?
 
ProTip: Copy paste article title into google & then it lets you through the paywall.
 
Very well written article, thank you.

Will just have to wait and see what the future holds for other newspapers, and if this new trend will reach SA too.
 
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Well i think these big newspapers/media companies should go for it. I'm one of those sceptical ones that believe newspapers always have some sinister agenda via government,religion or politics . So putting up a "paywall" to their sites will prevent their "brainwashing" agenda is most likely going to do most of the population more good. Sometimes i wish News24 should do it too, so everyone starts reading more "independent" news and not the news Naspers puts out.

Of course, the other side effect is, it implies news companies will need to produce quality content. Simply "reporting" on the news is not worth paying for, we will need good articles, good opinions..you know the type of stuff you see on Time Magazine ....so it's a tricky thing when there's so many bloggers out there who write more quality and "on your level" content than media companies....

To put it simply: To pay to read "Rapport" or "Sunday Times" only to find boring "dodging the issue" about the ANC/Malema/Libya/Shaick/Mines of no consequence or read a free blog about people who speak their mind.
 
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diabolus said:
Sometimes i wish News24 should do it too, so everyone starts reading more "independent" news and not the news Naspers puts out.
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News24 won't get any paying subscribers - the quality of the reporting and the grammar etc is too pathetic...
 
The only way you get people to pay is if you have high quality content that they can't find anywhere else. Most newspapers don't fit this bill so there is about zero chance of it working for all but the very, very best of publications. It might therefore work for a quality site like the NYT, but I don't see it becoming a trend - and if it does expect it to not last for very long... Just my opinion. People will not pay for generic AP articles, and the self-generated stuff needs to be of a massively high standard to make it worth paying any money for.

To be honest I wouldn't pay for any news at all - you can't start charging for something everyone is so used to getting for free. I'll just go somewhere else for my news, no big deal.
 
I don't know if newspapers are really about trust. I don't trust E News or their journalists as far as I can throw them, but I watch it because they manage to dash out the headlines faster than SABC.
Aren't we all so critical of what we see anyway? We get trust through viewing multiple sources, and agencies also watch each others' facts. The content hardly ever affects me personally so it doesn't matter if the news is untrustworthy, it must just be entertaining. See how spoof news programs are more popular than their sources. Its a cultural protectionism, where we absorb hard realities into more palatable fairy tales. The content is almost always meaningless. Except the weather.
 
Meh, I had a bunch of NYT feeds on my Google Reader, so many that I could actually never keep up. I'd be the 1st to admit they put out some great stuff. It was great while it was free, but I won't be paying, they don't provide me with anything I can do without. Same thing happened when The Times went behind the wall. I miss reading Clarkson's column, but there are tons of other things to keep me entertained while I'm supposed to be working.
 
The sooner all of Murdoch's fascist propaganda is buried behind as many barriers as possible the better.

I spit on anything NewsCorp.
 
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