Read All About How Paywalls Are Bad For Democracy, Right Behind This Paywall
from the sign-in-to-read-this-story dept
Well, hey, let’s start this article by noting that Techdirt has no paywall, no annoying or intrusive advertising. And we almost never even bug people about the fact that there are many ways to support the site, including getting early access to some articles, the ability to join our Insider Discord, and other features as well. And we really do rely on support from readers to keep doing what we do without a paywall or other nuisances.
And a key reason that we don’t paywall our writing is because we think it diminishes the value of it. Techdirt is about helping more people understand issues around tech, policy, business, law, and civil liberties, and we can’t do a very good job of that if it’s all hidden behind a paywall.
Indeed, there has been a flood of articles from deep thinkers all about how dangerous paywalling all our news is for democracy over the last few years, with the clearest one being Nathan Robinson’s “The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.”
But that was hardly the first to raise the topic. Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti said more or less the same thing in 2017. That was, you know, a few years before he shut down Buzzfeed News.
But it’s not hard to find variations on this headline basically everywhere you look:
- Democracy Dies With Paywalls
- Democracy dies behind paywalls
- Democracy dies behind the paywall: a critique of elite journalism
The latest entry into this category comes from the lofty perches of the Atlantic. They also titled their piece, by Richard Stengel, “Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls.”
In it, though, Stengel puts on his advocacy hat to make the case that journalism should be free, at least through the 2024 US election. There’s just one big problem. Stengel apparently failed to convince his own publisher, because, well, take a look:
If you can’t see that, it’s the article we’re talking about. It shows the headline and the subhead reading “The case for making journalism free—at least during the 2024 election” followed by a popup noting “To read this story, sign in or start a free trial.”
Oops.
That’s not to say the article is bad. It’s actually quite good. It just feels a bit on the ironic side. From that paywalled article:
Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.
The problem is not just that professionally produced news is behind a wall; the problem is that paywalls increase the proportion of free and easily available stories that are actually filled with misinformation and disinformation. Way back in 1995 (think America Online), the UCLA professor Eugene Volokh predicted that the rise of “cheap speech”—free internet content—would not only democratize mass media by allowing new voices, but also increase the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which would then destabilize mass media.
Some of us out here in the cheap speech seats continue to fight the good fight of providing information that is beneficial to voters, but sometimes it means we need to deal with impossible paywalls on our own. And, also, continually seek out new business models.
And, look, most people recognize that the media business is facing a ton of challenges these days. There are reports of journalist layoffs all the time. The internet effectively “unbundled” the package of things that made the newspaper worth buying as a whole in the past (classifieds, sports, comics, news, reviews, etc.) and made it so that each bit could be produced separately, but, perhaps, without the corresponding business model to prop it up.
Because of that, it’s no surprise that desperation sets in. And when desperation sets in, too many people go for the easy shot: “we need money, people should pay us, so we have money.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t take the reality of the competitive landscape, the market, and the information ecosystem into account. Charging for news online might work a lot better if there wasn’t so much competitive stuff freely available.
Many people point out that before the internet, most news required a subscription (leaving aside things like libraries and free weeklies and whatnot). However, when there is so much information available for free, putting all of the good, credible information behind a paywall can allow the “free” zone to be flooded with shit.
In his (paywalled) piece against paywalls, Stengel argues that paywalls are one of the major reasons that American trust in media is so low. He assumes that what most people see as media is mostly terrible crap that they get for free, while the good journalism is behind a paywall. I’m not entirely convinced that’s true, and it would be great to see some data on that. But anecdotally, I don’t think the reason the account MAGAhat1488 thinks the press is the enemy of the people isn’t because he doesn’t want to plunk down for a New Yorker subscription.
To be fair to Stengel (though, not to his publisher at the Atlantic, which could have easily lifted the paywall), he admits to the irony:
The best way to address these challenges is for newsrooms to remove or suspend their paywalls for stories related to the 2024 election. I am mindful of the irony of putting this plea behind The Atlantic’s own paywall, but that’s exactly where the argument should be made. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably paid to support journalism that you think matters in the world. Don’t you want it to be available to others, too, especially those who would not otherwise get to see it?
Now, of course, the bigger underlying issue is that news orgs need sustainable business models (hey, reminder: support Techdirt!). But, as Stengel notes, a lot of publications did lift their paywalls during the height of the pandemic and actually found that it helped rather than hurt their business:
During the pandemic, some publications found that suspending their paywall had an effect they had not anticipated: It increased subscriptions. The Seattle Times, the paper of record in a city that was an early epicenter of coronavirus, put all of its COVID-related content outside the paywall and then saw, according to its senior vice president of marketing, Kati Erwert, “a very significant increase in digital subscriptions”—two to three times its previous daily averages. The Philadelphia Inquirer put its COVID content outside its paywall in the spring of 2020 as a public service. And then, according to the paper’s director of special projects, Evan Benn, it saw a “higher than usual number of digital subscription sign-ups.”
The Tampa Bay Times, The Denver Post, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press, in Minnesota, all experienced similar increases, as did papers operated by the Tribune Publishing Company, including the Chicago Tribune and the Hartford Courant. The new subscribers were readers who appreciated the content and the reporting and wanted to support the paper’s efforts, and to make the coverage free for others to read, too.
I have always argued that it’s best to make the core reporting free. You can then charge for other things and see if you can get people to support you. It could be things like events, or early access to articles (as in the case of Techdirt!), or access to the reporters. It sounds like the COVID paywall removals discovered the same kinda thing: people were interested in paying for something to support the paper delivering them good news.
The journalism acted as an advertisement for the paper itself in many ways. News orgs need to lean into that element. Let the journalism act as promotion, and find other ways to get people to pay to support.
There are ways to do it, but it seems odd to advocate for it behind a paywall.
Filed Under: democracy, informed public, journalism, paywalls, richard stengel
Companies: the atlantic
Comments on “Read All About How Paywalls Are Bad For Democracy, Right Behind This Paywall”
Just to clarify; you don’t have my card information on file, right? I was thinking about it but giving my card info on these internet sites spooks me a bit.
Re:
I almost exclusively use a credit card anyway. It effectively acts as a firewall between my bank accounts and vendors, any of whom could be compromised.
If my credit card gets used fraudulently, the credit card company has to try to get my money.
If my debit card gets used fraudulently, I have to try to get my own money back.
Re: Re:
That’s fine, I just don’t want my online identity to be directly linked to my real identity via card. Maybe it’s simpler than that, I’m an old man haha
Re: Re: Re:
Ah. Privacy is dead on the internet unless you’re taking significant steps to protect it.
The only reason Mike doesn’t know who I am is that he doesn’t care to.
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We offer a variety of ways to support us, which go through a variety of different vendors, whom we believe are trustworthy and follow strong best practices regarding how they handle information.
We, personally, don’t have access to anyone’s credit card number, nor do we want access to anyone’s credit card number, but if you’re paying by credit card, someone has to get the card to process the payment, whether it’s paypal or stripe or a vendor like Patreon (who probably uses Stripe on the backend anyway).
I haven’t looked lately, but most such services allow you to designate that they not keep your cc for a one time purchase. For a recurring payment subscription, then obviously they need to keep a card on file, but again, the companies handling it on our behalf are widely considered the gold standard on the security side.
Nearly all paywalls at newspapers use cookies to figure out whether you have reached the monthly article limit
That can be solved by deleting your cookies turning the count back to zero
Another way w.which the Sydney morning herald used to use was a query script, but I shut that down by telling the firewall I had at the time to block any URL with jQuery in it and it neutered that paywall
When I did that I brike no laws in Queensland, New South Wales, California, or any federal laws in either Australia or the United States
Doing that also stopped ad block detection on a lot of sites, a d that, too, does not break the law anywhere in Australia or the United States
Blocking jquery in the firewall to shut down ad blocker detection did not break Australia or USA laws
.
The firewall service I was using for $20 a month per firewall device also allowed me to block all ads
Ii was also part of my online radio station that funded the station and allowed it to operate ad free
My VPN was aimed at people in schools, offices, abd the like to allowed people to bypass the workplace firewall without risking the network
Office fiktering goes too far, abd I had more sable filtering the same as we had at our online radio station
We blocked things that do not belong in offices like porn, gambling, hate.speech, and a few other things
Payments were in in Bitcoin because we did not know abd did not want to know who our VPN customers were
While we did not keep permanen logs, it could where people were coming from while logged in, and then go poof when they logged off
Some of our customers were high school students because during the media sitesschool day in America I would see connections going to social media sites
These kids were breaking no laws using our VPN to bypass their schools filters to get to their favorite social media sites.
And we broke no laws in Australia, France, England, Germany, the USA, or any state laws in California, Texas, Arizona, Montana, or Illinois by allowing that
This was fully legal at all of our server locations
It did not break any
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I tried that once and still crashed into a paywall.
Javascript toggle
I occasionally read the Atlantic and had no idea it was behind a paywall because I keep javascript off most of the time.
Every decent browser has a javascript toggle, and this “defeats” most paywalls. Bonus: no ads.
(I pay for the Times and a few others, tho.)
Can you unflood the zone?
There’s a bigger, less surmountable issue beyond to paywall or not to paywall.
Once the zone has been flooded with shit, can the zone be unflooded?
There’s more than one problem here besides the feculent flood. The other problem is the context collapse brought upon by large internet communities and fueled by algorithms.
Fitzwishing (phonetic of FTZWS) convinced the world that objective truth is merely a value judgment, no better or worse than falsehoods or bullshit. Nothing has to be true or false anymore. Nothing is true and everything is possible, and anything is true if you want it to be true.
If the only impression readers have of your stuff is 'worthless page filler'...
I can’t say I’m surprised that not paywalling important stuff resulted in more eyes and money for the papers, after all if the only stuff available to potential readers is worthless drek why would they think that the stuff you have to pay for would be any better?
One other note about paywall-centric journalism: it makes it transient.
Back when everything went into newspapers, libraries collected those newspapers for people to read 100 years in the future.
When things started going digital, archive.org was created, which archived all the digital content.
But when paywalls took hold, for the most part, the paywalls also blocked archive.org from accessing the content (because otherwise, people could just go to archive.org to read it).
As a result, the “back issues,” if they exist at all, are siloed by the provider and anyone who happened to save a copy who paid for it. And as soon as the publisher decides to take their service in a different direction, all that content can vanish. Not to mention, stuff gets lost with every “site refresh” – where the content is no longer searchable and isn’t accessible at its old location.
All this to say: it’s very possible that we could wake up one day and find that the only version of our history that’s available is a fake one that was carefully crafted by someone with an agenda, and the real content of generations is nothing more than tatters held here and there by a few archivists with enough money to preserve what they could while they could.
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The hilarious and bitter irony?
Our understanding of the past was also shaped by the same rich people in the past who could afford to pay people to write stuff down.
History may not repeat itself but…
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I worked for a paper 20 years ago and then a sister pub 10 years ago. Last year, both shut down. The websites are just gone. So, short of the few stories and pages I emailed myself at the time, much of my work history is unverifiable.
I’d need to fly halfway across the country to go to a library and Xerox pages from a bound edition just to see what I wrote.
There’s a reason regional papers gained the distinction as “papers of record,” and closing up shop causes downstream effects beyond not being able to reference historical events. So “doomed to repeat” has become part of the culture.