You aren't really engaging with the point. Yes, there is high quality information out there, a torrent of it...but the organizations that curate and contextualize that torrent to make it intelligible to regular people are now behind firewalls.
And, sorry, a LOT of the contextualization being done for free is being done by bloodless psychopaths with an agenda and a whole narnia-sized mountain of skeletons in their closet. Your little substack does not make up for that.
NPR and PBS are free and very high quality. Plus, as you mentioned, CNN’s website is excellent. There are many daily morning newsletters that will give you the day’s headlines and a brief synopsis of each story. I think you’re right: people want the bad information. It’s not that they can’t access good quality news.
You get what you pay for. Trust in MSM is at an all time low; more people would pay if they provided a better product. We are the media now, comrade ;)
This is all so much more complicated than 'paywalls bad, mmkay?'. Firstly, things like 12ft.io and archive.ph exist and work with almost every paywall. So if someone's really motivated, they can find a way to read an article. Less motivated readers may well find that news summarised elsewhere for free.
When it comes to partisanship in news, the main issue in the US is talk radio followed by cable TV news, and that can all be traced back to partisan billionaires taking advantage of Reagan era deregulation to enshittify, as Cory Doctorow would say, the news. In the UK, those same crappy billionaires take advantage of Thatcher era deregulation, the revolving door between the conservative media and Parliament, and the increasing toothlessness of regulatory bodies to enshittify the tabloids to an extreme extent. (Though the Daily Mail has been fully shittified since before it came out in favour of Hitler.) (And for non-UK folks, we have a much, much stronger set of broadcast regulations to Fox News died on its arse here, and GB News is going the same way.)
As for news business models, the news has always been largely subsidised by other income streams which many news orgs shed in the mistaken belief that they were streamlining their operations. When The Guardian got rid of its share of AutoTrader, it was selling off the goose that laid the golden egg in the name of "secur[ing] the financial future of the print titles" and shedding AutoTrader's debt, but it's not clear to me that it did indeed give itself 30 years free of financial woes. Better would have been not loading AutoTrader up with debt in the first place.
I'm not even going to get into Gannett (now Tegna – as the joke went around the newsrooms during yet another round of layoffs, Gannett forced all its letters to reapply for their jobs). I've never seen so much financial illiteracy as I did at Gannett, particularly with how they took small but profitable local newspapers and utterly gutted them in order to try to make up for loss-making papers in major metro areas. The idiocy of their strategy was so blindingly obvious to everyone else but them. Reach in the UK isn't doing much better.
The news has always been broccoli, and no one's going to sit down and pay to eat a meal of greens. You need a roast to go with it and most media companies don't have that anymore. Worse, most of them feel like to serve a nice roast is in some way unethical or damages the purity of their mission. Journalists hate talking money, yet they get promoted into senior roles where their allergy to finances does real damage.
The news industry has a lot it needs to fix, but it won't happen.
I was struck by A.G. Sulzberger's comment to David Remnick in the New Yorker: "I think it is so interesting that our industry is obsessed with making the news free, even though the news is so expensive to create." We have so many more options now, free and paid. And the paid ones are not really that expensive, relative to other goods and services. Great analysis as always, Simon.
Thing is, the seeker can find great information. Its like a rosetta stone. Yet reality shows most ppl dont just seek out academic journals, experts, references, primary sourcing, govt docs, grassroots organizations, personal bligs or substacks, and smaller organizations etc. Most average ppl scroll through their phone in basic google search results or on social media. Thats the reality. So larger brand news gets more traffic and marketing and links plus mass media etc. There has been a deficit of good journalists working with mass media news companies, and the paywalls further isolates the casual reader. This is all obviously just a cheap defense of substack type model. It only results in subscriber silos, and haves and have nots, and zero impact on the societal zeitgeist or thinking
Paywalls make it difficult to collect all the high-quality information about a topic in order to have better informed theories about it. 4 or 5 subscriptions are only cost-effective for certified news addicts.
I don't disagree with the thrust of your piece, Simon. But newsletters and Youtube don't make up for high quality coverage of local news — court proceedings, civic politics, investigations. That's either disappeared or gone behind a paywall, and the audiences that's trying to serve aren't willing to seek out other sources of information, so they're left with Newsmax.
A couple of observations: people have always had the option to pay for news, paying for online access isn't a different model to buying a newspaper, and under both mediums, we know that advertising is the larger revenue stream.
Paywalled content isn't automatically higher quality, more truthful, objective, rational, or accurate than free content. That's an assumption in search of evidence.
When I was growing up (in Scotland in the1970's), there were two types of information sources - free and paid. Free was basically TV and radio (which I accessed at home), and books which I could access by going to the library. All of these were "curated" of course.
Paid information was newspapers/magazines, and books from bookshops (primarily). These were also "curated" - both by the creators of these artefacts, and by me/my parents in choosing which we bought. People who couldn't afford those sources (or chose not to spend money on them) generally didn't have access to them. There were sources outside those spheres, of course - newsletters etc delivered by post to people who knew they existed and (generally) paid for them, but they were a tiny minority compared to the sources above.
The information sources I have today can also be split into the same two camps, as Simon has described, but the real difference is in the Volume of information available through those sources, and the Convenience with which I can access them. Whilst "internet" sources are in themselves curated (to some extent), the sheer number of sources means that the only real curation that matters is mine - what do I choose to read and when (and where)?
The "paywalls" of the past prevented the majority of people reading the FT (for example); the FT paywall of today actually allows you to read some of the FTs content in the comfort of your own home, instead of making your way to the public library (if they actually had it on their shelves).
Basically: paywalls always existed, everyone now has access to more information than they ever had before, but they're more in control of what they access - this increased control can be a Good and a Bad thing
You make very interesting points but I'm not entirely convinced.
First of all, misinformation and disinformation are at an advantage because they're cheap to make. Fabricating or twisting facts costs nothing, but good reporting is expensive. In the past, all newspapers cost something, and it was expensive to make and distribute them, so misinformation and disinformation were not able to proliferate as easily compared to high quality journalism. Unless you want to argue that misinformation and disinformation were as rampant in the pre-internet era as they are now.
Second, while it's true that hardcore ideologues will always choose the media that reflect their beliefs, there are also many casual consumers of news who are exposed to disinformation and misinformation on social media, and they'll read it because it's free. In the past, they would just have ignored the news or simply learnt about it on free TV news shows.
When we look at the impact of paywalls, we need to consider the current context and the competition between high quality journalism and disinformation/misinformation.
If the big legacy media were freely available and were the go-to news source for more people, maybe that would make at least some difference.
I think paywalls block those who cannot afford to pay to be shielded from important news. It’s a set up. Hiding. They’d leave anything nonsense, unimportant, casual news, maybe even lies, untouched for everyone but definitely make you pay to see the truth. It’s so biased.
You aren't really engaging with the point. Yes, there is high quality information out there, a torrent of it...but the organizations that curate and contextualize that torrent to make it intelligible to regular people are now behind firewalls.
And, sorry, a LOT of the contextualization being done for free is being done by bloodless psychopaths with an agenda and a whole narnia-sized mountain of skeletons in their closet. Your little substack does not make up for that.
NPR and PBS are free and very high quality. Plus, as you mentioned, CNN’s website is excellent. There are many daily morning newsletters that will give you the day’s headlines and a brief synopsis of each story. I think you’re right: people want the bad information. It’s not that they can’t access good quality news.
You get what you pay for. Trust in MSM is at an all time low; more people would pay if they provided a better product. We are the media now, comrade ;)
This is all so much more complicated than 'paywalls bad, mmkay?'. Firstly, things like 12ft.io and archive.ph exist and work with almost every paywall. So if someone's really motivated, they can find a way to read an article. Less motivated readers may well find that news summarised elsewhere for free.
When it comes to partisanship in news, the main issue in the US is talk radio followed by cable TV news, and that can all be traced back to partisan billionaires taking advantage of Reagan era deregulation to enshittify, as Cory Doctorow would say, the news. In the UK, those same crappy billionaires take advantage of Thatcher era deregulation, the revolving door between the conservative media and Parliament, and the increasing toothlessness of regulatory bodies to enshittify the tabloids to an extreme extent. (Though the Daily Mail has been fully shittified since before it came out in favour of Hitler.) (And for non-UK folks, we have a much, much stronger set of broadcast regulations to Fox News died on its arse here, and GB News is going the same way.)
As for news business models, the news has always been largely subsidised by other income streams which many news orgs shed in the mistaken belief that they were streamlining their operations. When The Guardian got rid of its share of AutoTrader, it was selling off the goose that laid the golden egg in the name of "secur[ing] the financial future of the print titles" and shedding AutoTrader's debt, but it's not clear to me that it did indeed give itself 30 years free of financial woes. Better would have been not loading AutoTrader up with debt in the first place.
I'm not even going to get into Gannett (now Tegna – as the joke went around the newsrooms during yet another round of layoffs, Gannett forced all its letters to reapply for their jobs). I've never seen so much financial illiteracy as I did at Gannett, particularly with how they took small but profitable local newspapers and utterly gutted them in order to try to make up for loss-making papers in major metro areas. The idiocy of their strategy was so blindingly obvious to everyone else but them. Reach in the UK isn't doing much better.
The news has always been broccoli, and no one's going to sit down and pay to eat a meal of greens. You need a roast to go with it and most media companies don't have that anymore. Worse, most of them feel like to serve a nice roast is in some way unethical or damages the purity of their mission. Journalists hate talking money, yet they get promoted into senior roles where their allergy to finances does real damage.
The news industry has a lot it needs to fix, but it won't happen.
I was struck by A.G. Sulzberger's comment to David Remnick in the New Yorker: "I think it is so interesting that our industry is obsessed with making the news free, even though the news is so expensive to create." We have so many more options now, free and paid. And the paid ones are not really that expensive, relative to other goods and services. Great analysis as always, Simon.
Thing is, the seeker can find great information. Its like a rosetta stone. Yet reality shows most ppl dont just seek out academic journals, experts, references, primary sourcing, govt docs, grassroots organizations, personal bligs or substacks, and smaller organizations etc. Most average ppl scroll through their phone in basic google search results or on social media. Thats the reality. So larger brand news gets more traffic and marketing and links plus mass media etc. There has been a deficit of good journalists working with mass media news companies, and the paywalls further isolates the casual reader. This is all obviously just a cheap defense of substack type model. It only results in subscriber silos, and haves and have nots, and zero impact on the societal zeitgeist or thinking
Paywalls make it difficult to collect all the high-quality information about a topic in order to have better informed theories about it. 4 or 5 subscriptions are only cost-effective for certified news addicts.
I don't disagree with the thrust of your piece, Simon. But newsletters and Youtube don't make up for high quality coverage of local news — court proceedings, civic politics, investigations. That's either disappeared or gone behind a paywall, and the audiences that's trying to serve aren't willing to seek out other sources of information, so they're left with Newsmax.
A couple of observations: people have always had the option to pay for news, paying for online access isn't a different model to buying a newspaper, and under both mediums, we know that advertising is the larger revenue stream.
Paywalled content isn't automatically higher quality, more truthful, objective, rational, or accurate than free content. That's an assumption in search of evidence.
When I was growing up (in Scotland in the1970's), there were two types of information sources - free and paid. Free was basically TV and radio (which I accessed at home), and books which I could access by going to the library. All of these were "curated" of course.
Paid information was newspapers/magazines, and books from bookshops (primarily). These were also "curated" - both by the creators of these artefacts, and by me/my parents in choosing which we bought. People who couldn't afford those sources (or chose not to spend money on them) generally didn't have access to them. There were sources outside those spheres, of course - newsletters etc delivered by post to people who knew they existed and (generally) paid for them, but they were a tiny minority compared to the sources above.
The information sources I have today can also be split into the same two camps, as Simon has described, but the real difference is in the Volume of information available through those sources, and the Convenience with which I can access them. Whilst "internet" sources are in themselves curated (to some extent), the sheer number of sources means that the only real curation that matters is mine - what do I choose to read and when (and where)?
The "paywalls" of the past prevented the majority of people reading the FT (for example); the FT paywall of today actually allows you to read some of the FTs content in the comfort of your own home, instead of making your way to the public library (if they actually had it on their shelves).
Basically: paywalls always existed, everyone now has access to more information than they ever had before, but they're more in control of what they access - this increased control can be a Good and a Bad thing
You make very interesting points but I'm not entirely convinced.
First of all, misinformation and disinformation are at an advantage because they're cheap to make. Fabricating or twisting facts costs nothing, but good reporting is expensive. In the past, all newspapers cost something, and it was expensive to make and distribute them, so misinformation and disinformation were not able to proliferate as easily compared to high quality journalism. Unless you want to argue that misinformation and disinformation were as rampant in the pre-internet era as they are now.
Second, while it's true that hardcore ideologues will always choose the media that reflect their beliefs, there are also many casual consumers of news who are exposed to disinformation and misinformation on social media, and they'll read it because it's free. In the past, they would just have ignored the news or simply learnt about it on free TV news shows.
When we look at the impact of paywalls, we need to consider the current context and the competition between high quality journalism and disinformation/misinformation.
If the big legacy media were freely available and were the go-to news source for more people, maybe that would make at least some difference.
Agreed. The free era was a fantasy. Also: I don't think paid news is prohibitively expensive. Most places charge the price of a coffee.
I think paywalls block those who cannot afford to pay to be shielded from important news. It’s a set up. Hiding. They’d leave anything nonsense, unimportant, casual news, maybe even lies, untouched for everyone but definitely make you pay to see the truth. It’s so biased.