Chicago Sun-Times Kills Its Paywall; Makes Its Content Free For Everyone
from the welcome-to-the-future dept
Going back many, many years, we’ve argued that paywalls are not a particularly sustainable model for most journalism enterprises. There are some exceptions. They seem to work in cases where breaking news and timely access are extremely important (e.g., financial news), and in cases where there is a strong community built up around the news provider (both small and large). A few months back I did a fun podcast discussion looking at why I was wrong when I predicted the NY Times paywall would fail. It’s worth listening to the whole thing, but the crux of it was that I didn’t expect the NY Times to be able to build up the kind of communal support that it eventually did — whereby many people felt that, in the age of Donald Trump, they had to be supporting media organizations like the Times.
But, still, I strongly believe that most general interest news orgs will find a paywall does not work and it actually harms the journalism the news organization is attempting to do. Over the years, we’ve seen various news organizations that gleefully put up a paywall back down and admit defeat as they removed the paywall, often noting how few readers actually paid, and how it actually tended to boost competitors without paywalls.
The latest to do so is the Chicago Sun-Times, which has announced that it has now dropped its paywall. What’s most interesting to me is that the newspaper seems almost joyous about this decision in its announcement, recognizing it can better serve the people of Chicago this way.
As a reader of the Chicago Sun-Times, you turn to us for the news you need to thrive. For timely, accurate and fairly reported stories on the issues that matter most. For stories that celebrate and honor the members of our community, from victories on the field to remembrances of lives well lived. Our journalists care about your community because it’s our community, too. And we strongly believe that everyone in the Chicago area should have access to the news, features and investigations we produce, regardless of their ability to pay.
So today, we are dropping our paywall and making it possible for anyone to read our website for free by providing nothing more than an email address. Instead of a paywall, we are launching a donation-based digital membership program that will allow readers to pay what they can to help us deliver the news you rely on.
It’s a bold move: Reporting the news is expensive, and the converging market forces of inflation and an anticipated (or possibly already here) recession could further endanger local newsrooms like ours. But we know it’s the right thing to do.
For the Sun-Times’ next chapter to be successful, it is essential for us to be truly open and inclusive so we can tell the stories that matter to all parts of our community. A membership program connects our revenue model more closely to how well we serve our community, holding us accountable to you, our readers. We think that’s a good thing, because if we’re not serving you, we’re not doing our jobs. So we’re taking a leap of faith and putting our trust in you.
This is a really open and honest announcement, noting that it still does need the support of readers to survive, but rather than beating people over the head with a paywall, and basically treating people who want to see the news as potential thieves, the Sun-Times is being open, and honest, and treating its community with respect. Hopefully it works out better than the paywall approach. It would be great to see more news organizations realize that locking up all your content is often a path to irrelevance.
Filed Under: business models, journalism, paywalls
Companies: chicago sun-times
Comments on “Chicago Sun-Times Kills Its Paywall; Makes Its Content Free For Everyone”
We’re they honest enough to say what they will be doing with your email address?
Re: ah don't worry
Give them an old junk email you never check except for account confirmation. That old yahoo or hotmail email is probably still active (if you still have the password!)
One important note you missed was the Sun-Times merged with Chicago Public Media earlier this year. In the process it became not-for-profit and I believe it is now the largest not-for-profit newsroom in the country.
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Ahh. This seems particularly relevant.
Sun-Times as public media
The Sun-Times is now owned by a public media corp, so this makes even more sense. But this will be an especially interesting test case because Chicago is one of the fewer and fewer US cities with competing dailies. The Trip is owned by an investment group, not Gannett, but not exactly unlike it either.
Mike, you must be a White Sox fan, promoting the Sun Times. Tribune, all the way! 🙂
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Maybe he likes to read more than the sports section, because every time I’ve read the Tribune, it’s like trying to interpret the meaning of two week old reheated cow patties.
They haven’t dropped the paywall, they’ve changed it from a cash payment to a payment-in-kind, i.e., providing personal information to proceed through the paywall.
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You know, I stopped reading NYT for two reasons, even after the paywall: their already overrated reporting became less worse and they started plagiarizing competitors.
Because when you decide that the article you’re reading isn’t worth finding a way around the paywall anymore… Then it’s neither worth stealing or reading. I almost feel sorry for people paying them any money, but those people are clearly schmucks so no.
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Copying is not theft, and mere reading most certainly isn’t.
News organizations still don’t seem to understand the mental state of their readers. Readers may have opened 20 tabs linked from who-knows-where, without regard to what organization is hosting those pages. When they later find a tab demanding something of them, are they even gonna remember how they got there or why this thing might have been of interest? Just close it and read something else. If it’s truly important, others will be reporting it, and a working link will eventually show up.
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“If it’s truly important, others will be reporting it, and a working link will eventually show up.”
Not dunking on you personally, because the genie isn’t going back in the bottle, but depends on what you define as important. The L.A. Times as a prime example in a giant metro area is not what it used to be in terms of staffing. If you live outside of New York City or Washington D.C., there are way fewer reporters paying attention to what is happening in your city or town. “Someone will aggregate it for me” is part of the reason its difficult to carve out a middle-class existence covering the courts beat in Lansing or Columbus.
too many subs
I cant see paying a sub for every single news site I happen to read a few articles a month. There’s just too many.
Paywalls on general news outlets has always been somewhat mystifying for me, anyway. They make sense if you visit a site on a regular basis, but with so much news being shared through social media and originating from an AP or other feed, it’s not unusual to be following a link through to a site you’ve never been to before, and/or never will again.
It all depends on your personal usage and how often you visit a site, but I’ll never quite grasp why some outlets choose to block all casual traffic that could grow their readership, while banking on a shrinking pool of existing regular readers to keep them afloat. It’s tempting to blame an old school business mindset, but even in the heyday of the printed newspaper, they still understood that way more people would read a copy than paid the cover price or subscribed.
Kudos to them from changing in this case, though as others have noted it seems to be a specific type of ownership change that triggered it here, and not a sign of some wider understanding from the industry.
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I remember when newspapers not only bragged about how many non-paying readers the average copy had, the tendency was to inflate that statistic as much as they figured they could get away with.
Every eyeball was recognized as more opportunity, not freeloading or even “theft”.
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They also did not face the competition from search engines and social media for advertisers. Throat-clearing, I’m not saying paywalls are the way. Only that in the day of the physical paper, newspapers could much-more effectively monetize their readership to advertisers, so talking up their readership benefited them to a greater extent than it now does, with no large tech companies were taking a cut.
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“They also did not face the competition from search engines and social media for advertisers”
They didn’t, but also they didn’t have those same companies sending them traffic for free as they do now. 20-30 years ago, they sold ads based on how many people would read a copy without paying for it, estimating several times more than they sold. Now, they’re blocking people who go to their sites without ever having been there before and expecting a subscription before reading the content. An old school paper would assume 4 people in a break room would read a copy, now they try to charge all 5 people and whine that they don’t have as many readers.
“large tech companies were taking a cut”
You mean… when Google send them free traffic and supply the ads they take a cut of both of those services? Truly shocking. Obviously, the answer is to give new readers a screen that tells them to click the back button and go to another source for the story they wanted to read… The dumbest thing about these arguments is when people try to pretend that all the search and ad services don’t provide value or cost anything, especially when it’s so easy and free to opt out if papers wish to do so.
I understand some of the whining about “big tech” (which somehow always excludes ISPs, telecoms and other major networks), but if it’s “they want to be paid for the traffic and ads they provide when someone uses a free service to see your content they wouldn’t have seen otherwise”, I’m not particularly sympathetic. I still see physical free newspapers on the regular, and I’m sure they have bigger overheads than the online platform who rewrite AP feeds and get free viewers from search engines and link aggregators.
Copy right issues always there & difficult to avoid it
It all depends on your usage and how often you visit a site. Still, I’ll never quite grasp why some outlets block all casual traffic that could grow their readership while banking on a shrinking pool of existing regular readers to keep them afloat. It’s tempting to blame an old-school business mindset, but even in the heyday of the printed newspaper, they still understood that way more people would read a copy than pay the cover price or subscribe.
you can contact on: https://shubham.in.net/aboutus.php
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To be fair these people aren’t their subscribers in the first place so it’s like going into Burger King getting grossed out and complain how fast food is ruining the world without giving them a dime so they look at you like your the weird one barging into their store just to complain.
Too many of those types have ruined these sits so I can see why they issue paywalls to keep the trash out.
They’ll just continue polluting their crap smoking dope under the bridge in downtown instead of bringing their filth everywhere else dragging society down with em at leas that’s the basic ideas with the paywall.
Before the paywall most people didn’t have access to the internet unless they had a computer and that required a bit of skills to setup as setting up a modem was done a lot more manual.
Essentially you couldn’t be out of it online as much where smartphones have tiny screens limiting what one can see so to begin with they are not going to be typing a detailed reply. If you want to get into deeper discussions good luck!
And Google is in big trouble too for being in bed with the government and most websites have to be seen by Google as they own all the search engines even Duck Duck Go.
Since the monopolies of WW2 we have increasingly had the ‘finance’ people run the businesses instead of someone whom cares and wants to make the business the best it can be.
Now what’s worse is we have young college grads that never have ran a business NOR even have any education on how money works buying things out and running it via ‘Board of Directors’ that also have no real experience.
They are all taught a lot of Marxist bull crap which does nothing at all for helping your business grow and treating customers right. In fact it often does quite the opposite!
This has caused a huge divide between have and have nots as the free market has slowly eroded there is no room for the little guy to make his hammer or saw company to sell stuff.
The finance and young collage people have made sure that’s not possible anymore by eating the little guy out so there only remains ONE hammer or saw company left by offering too good of deal trues to put the other hammer and saw companies out of business then buys out the sick ones only to throw them away so again only one hammer and saw company remains.
This ends up merging a bunch of smaller regional hammer and saw companies into one giant one that lives in it’s own reality bubble.