It feels like most information today is free, and it largely is. Movies and music are locked up in services like Netflix and Spotify, but most news and information is free, right?
It largely is, but the growing list of news outlets that are putting up paywalls is becoming troublesome. I don’t object to them doing that, as they deserve to get paid for what they do, but those paywalls are increasing causing division online.
Current Affairs listed this out, and you can easily see the split:
Paywalls:
The New York Times
The New Yorker
The Washington Post
The New Republic
New York
Harper’s
The New York Review of Books
The Financial Times
The London Times
No Paywalls:
Breitbart
Fox News
The Daily Wire
The Federalist
The Washington Examiner
InfoWars
It’s easy to see why content from the second list spreads far faster and wider than content from the top list. I personally pay for some of the sources in the top list, and read pieces from some on the bottom, but my paying doesn’t help the problem. Heck, it might be making it worse by encouraging them to keep using the paywall model.
It’s not unlike when a new scientific study comes out. YouTube videos that summarize the study (right or wrong) are completely free, but actually seeing the study itself generally costs money. As a result, the “research” that most people end up doing is simply watching the videos rather than digging into the study itself.
The solution?
I don’t have a good answer here. Our world would be well-served by having open access to the sites on the top to help balance things out. Those sites aren’t always right, for sure, but getting more conflicting viewpoints into the world is generally a good thing. It’ll be interesting to see how news-focused business models change in the coming years and if this is able to resolve itself or not.
There are two pieces of News. News interface provides a curated view across the 300 pubs using the readers preference selections. The other part is a direct index into all pubs on the sidebar and the main real estate handled by the new site with whatever they want to hi light. For magazines its usually the Contents page of that issue and then links to individual stories. I can usually get lost in there, but a better place than YouTube....
Your enumeration of the sites across the split does illustrate the problem. I have subscriptions to NYT and WP and subscriptions to some print pubs like the Atlantic and Vanity Fair that offer access online, but to gain a broader reach I do have an Apple + News subscription that brags about 300 pubs. That covers a lot, and a recent Chartbeat review says Apple garners about 40% of all aggregator-funneled reading. Apple had been successful in delivering a reader app that the users actually stay inside of, vs just redirecting to the source’s apps. Its sad that the advertising route does not raise enough funds to make advertising-paid reading work. But it does not work in print, either.