Dysmey Post > Essays > Politics > Newspapers Fail On The Web
The iPad, as I have stated before, is for the rest of them — them
being ignorant people with lots of money. But reading the newspaper on the iPad is hard to charge for when any of them can get the same news for free off the Web.
Rupert Murdoch and his followers have been complaining about this for years; and Murdoch has started practicing what he has been preaching by putting the Times of London behind a paywall. The Guardian and other English newspapers are gleeful of him doing just that. They know disaffected customers will flock to their Web sites after finding themselves shut out of the Web site of the Times.
And it is not just Murdoch: The New York Times plans to do the same by next year (2011). Never mind that the result will almost certainly be that of the Web site of its competitor, Newsday, which gets hardly a visitor. Bloggers on the NYT site are already leaving to set up indepedent blogs elsewhere, rather than face having their works trapped inside a wall.
So there is the problem for a newspaper: You want to stay on the Web. That is where everyone is. But you want to treat the Web as if it were a different form of newspaper, complete with ads. But that is not how the Web works. If a Web surfer cannot get the news they want from your site, they can get it elsewhere. And the more clever among the surfers can ignore your ads with browser extensions or by simply turning off Javascript. So you make no money off the Web site.
So you put up a paywall on your Web site to keep the surfers out, unless they give you the money you are not getting from your ads. But, as already stated, the surfers can go elsewhere, and nobody pays you anything. Worse, your talent — reporters with their articles, commentators with their blogs — realize that if nobody reads their works, their careers are in peril of obscurity. So they complain, or even quit.
This leads to another problem: Murdoch and his ilk have money coming out of all their orifices; and with money comes lots and lots of pull. This is why the debate becomes framed in terms of how we can appease the murdochists while dealing with the free-as-in-speech availability of information on the Web. And thus we have the paraphrased problem: The United States Government does not want to save newspapers by reining in fair use, creating a national
hot news
right over facts, or charging Internet subscribers anything. But the murdochists and their ilk do; and they are demanding that the federal government carry out some of the worst save the media
ideas ever put to paper.
This is (roughly) the preample for an article in Ars Technica on a review of newsgathering by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The article is titled Annals of Imbecility, because many of those ideas — ditch fair use, tax ISPs or electronics, create a monopoly on hot news
, exempt paywalls from antitrust laws — are guarantied to drive away the readership and their subscriptions, as well as entangle the newspapers in the courts.
As for the other ideas that the author of the article thinks are not so terrible, they also have unintended but nasty results.
Establish aIt is odd that the proposer thinks this is a good idea to use cheap young journalist labor while saying in the same breath that small dailies are laying off reporters. And, yeah, those are two contradictory ideas in the same sentence. This is a disaster for the same reason that compulsory civil service is a bad idea. It cheapens an already degradedly cheap market for journalists and makes it even more difficult for both newly-minted and seasoned reporters to find work. They cannot compete with free-as-in-beer. This is also the reason thejournalismdivision of AmeriCorps.
turn college students into journalistsidea is thoroughgoingly bad.
Boost public media funding.What, give IPR more Federal money if they spend it on local news? That will encourage listeners to NOT give to IPR! After all, since IPR are getting all this money from the Feds, why bother with pledges? The general manager of IPR had to talk the listenership out of a similar idea after the news that NPR got that big, big legacy from that McDonalds restaurant heiress. Also, this will make IPR compete with the Star-Press and other commercial newspapers, making news gathering more difficult.
Radio Free America?Oh, yeah, U.S. Government propaganda for the American masses. Give me a ◊◊◊◊ing break! If you think it is bad that Cuba, China and Iran jam your news signals, what do you think is going to happen when your own citizens start jamming them?
At least Google is kind enough to try to save the newspapers, even though the newspapers and the Associated Press (not knowing what robots.txt is for) are whining that Google is stealing their secret sauce, whatever that is. (?, which also mentions the Ars article.)