Richard Perez-Pena and Tim Arrango of The New York Times today document the slow return of the paywall in journalism.
Too many paywalls would put this blog in serious danger, so I'm an interested observer and fortunately it doesn't seem as though the publishers are any more together on this idea than the last time it came up.
“Content providers see that the idea that everything has to be free, supported by ads, isn’t working well, and they’re trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, but only partially,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and blogger who has been an executive at digital media companies.
He went on: “So we’re looking at some sort of an inflection point, at least in attitude. But I haven’t seen much realistic, hard-headed thinking about how that’s going to happen, so I don’t know how much is really going to change.”
The article is thoroughly sourced and worth a read if you are concerned about free access to news on the Internet as it shows where paywalls are more likely to advance as well as the continue fear of going first that is holding them back. Jay Rosen of NYU gets the final word on what it would take to get more people to pay - more value.
By that standard, much of the talk of wringing more money from Internet users rings hollow, said Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and a prominent blogger on media subjects. “People who really think we have to charge or the industry is sunk would be more persuasive if they said at the same time we have to add more value than we’ve been adding,” he said.
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