Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.
The
decision by its new owners at WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station, to take down the digital paywall at the Chicago Sun-Times
seems like a good moment to take stock of what I think we’ve come to know about
paywalls generally.
First,
there’s the narrow case of Chicago. I don’t think this decision should in any
way have been considered a surprise. It had been hinted at, and was in some
sense inevitable, not only in Chicago, but in any future combinations of
established public radio outlets and legacy newspapers—of which there will likely be more (beyond the one in Texas announced late last month).
Those
newspaper paywalls will fall because when, as in Chicago, you increasingly
cross-post news to both sites, you can’t realistically expect to have one site
be paid and the other free. And public media, the greatest business asset of
which remains its significant membership base, seems long ago to have made a
commitment to providing its content free to listeners and viewers. Moreover,
it’s important to remember that these deals do not, any rhetoric to the
contrary aside, represent a merger of equals. The last owner of the for-profit
Sun-Times, for instance, did not just decide to give it away to the nonprofit
WBEZ, he added many millions in cash to get the deal done.
Beyond
public media acquisitions, a number of issues with paywalls seem to me to be
coming into focus.
Where paywalls work: Broadly speaking, I think we now know that paywalls work only
when a publication is producing high quality content in high quantity. This is
the through-line from the Wall Street Journal (the earliest major adopter) to
the Financial Times (where the idea of the meter was developed) to the
later-adopting but now very successful New York Times and Washington Post among
newspapers and Atlantic and New Yorker among magazines.
Relatedly,
the problem for the vast majority of metropolitan newspapers is that while many
continue to produce high quality content on occasion (their best stories are in
many cases their best ever), they do not now do so in sufficient quantity to
attract a large enough group of paying digital subscribers. (The average
Gannett or Lee chain paper, for instance, has about 6000 paying digital
subscribers. That’s not enough to make this economic model work in the long
term.)
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There are big equity issues here: Paywalls are ultimately for richer
people. Journalists may be willing to pay for a passel of digital
subscriptions, but most civilians don’t feel like they have the money to do
that, even if they have the time. To put some numbers on this, fewer than one out of five Americans pays for online
news, and the median number of subscriptions among that group is two.
When you
target high income and wealth in this country, unfortunately you end up with an
audience that is disproportionately white, while Black and Latino people are
underrepresented. That is especially problematic in our cities, where paywalls
therefore have the effect of furthering the historical pattern of underserving
these communities, even when they represent a majority of residents.
This issue
is hiding in plain sight, and gets discussed too little in my view.
Publications with paywalls are delighted to boast to advertisers about many
characteristics of their subscribers—mostly with respect to consumption and
influence—but I know of none that publicly disclose their racial breakdown. If
they don’t know, it’s only because they don’t want to ask.
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Another,
admittedly much less significant, equity issue around paywalls surrounds the
use of meters of limited free views, which were the breakthrough innovation in
helping paywalls take off. Setting the meter at an economically optimal level
is relatively easy for larger organizations, with big audiences and
sophisticated analytic capabilities. But it’s much harder for smaller
organizations, especially community papers that have neither.
Bigger subscriber revenues have costs as well as benefits: Paywalls have been great for the
businesses of the news organizations that have the largest number of paid
online subscribers, especially as print advertising has continued its secular
decline and the platforms have monopolized digital advertising. But the growing
economic dependence of these publications on their readers is having
increasingly troublesome editorial consequences.
This
dependence, I think, is the principal source of the rising tide of consumerist
features and the increasing celebration of luxury items and trends. Even worse,
at least in my view, is what I am starting to see as a reluctance to challenge
readers’ preconceptions, even when those may not be deeply rooted in fact. What
is sometimes denigrated as “political correctness” is often, I fear, actually a
reluctance to discomfit paying subscribers.
I am
certainly not philosophically opposed to paywalls; I was an early and
consistent defender of the one at the Journal in the Nineties. I celebrate what
seems to be the likely salvation of some of our best news organizations, even
if hundreds of others are being left behind. I do think, however, that we need
to see the picture here in the whole, where solutions lie and where they don’t,
the problems being solved, but also those being created. Such a perspective can
help us chart the work ahead.
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