Getting What We Pay For
Recently, when the Worcester Telegram & Gazette began charging for access to online news stories, the public’s reaction was bitter rather than accepting.
After the T&G announced its new online fee structure, comments on its website trended heavily toward sour grapes.
“There’s nothing worth reading here, anyway, so I’m not going to pay for it” was the general attitude.
While it’s understandable to chafe at the idea of paying for something we once got for free, it’s not realistic. And let’s be honest. There isn’t a person alive who says, “My daily newspaper does a great job.” If you read a newspaper, you probably have complaints about a newspaper. That’s the nature of the business, and that’s also why the industry created a page for letters to the editor and online comment boards.
The Telegram & Gazette and its website provide a service. And to provide that service they must pay hundreds of people to research, write, report and edit. It's reasonable that they should require payment to help fund that work.
The Bottom Line
Questions of quality aside, the T&G has made a business decision, plain and simple. While some readers may be alienated, another group will continue to support the collection of local news online just as it did in print.
Daily newspapers have known for years that they would be required to charge for the news and information they provide online, and have done a poor job of explaining why that is. But consumers have known deep down that this day was coming.
We asked members of our LinkedIn group if they would pay for online news. One member said, “I recognize the need for publications to be compensated for the work they do. In fact, I’m surprised it’s taken newspapers this long to begin charging for access and restricting access. It’s absolutely imperative for daily newspapers and perhaps some other publications to do so!”
But another doubted the wisdom of charging for online content: “I agree that intellectual property in the form of articles are very valuable, but I don’t think this is the way to go. With all of the free newspapers online, I think people will just go elsewhere to get their news.”
And therein lies the difficult position the newspaper business has put itself in.
Publishing a newspaper is expensive and in its heyday, it was extraordinarily wasteful. Across the industry, revenue from online advertising has been growing steadily, but it’s not enough to offset rapidly declining revenue from print advertising.
By demanding that the T&G and other daily newspapers continue to offer web content for free, consumers are asking those newspapers to put fewer, less experienced and poorly paid reporters and editors on the street and are feeding into the degradation of news coverage.
In that way, online readers would sacrifice the T&G’s efforts to hold public and elected officials accountable, which it does very well, for free access to content that is less expensive to produce, but also less vital to the community.
Access to information is better than it has ever been. For example, if a reader can’t find information on the United States’ strategy in Afghanistan in one newspaper or website, he or she can seek out that information, in varying degrees of fairness and accuracy, on countless others.
But that’s less true on the local level, where the number of alternatives is fewer, and the gap in quality between the coverage provided by a newspaper like the T&G and any number of local blogs and websites is much greater.
The T&G’s new strategy should be a warning to advertisers as well. Daily newspapers are no longer in the position to give online advertising away for pennies on the dollar. The cost of advertising is about to increase. Despite sharing the media landscape with some new competition, the daily newspaper and its website is still the dominant source for news in nearly every major metro area of the country. Gathering news costs money. That cost has to be shared by both advertisers and readers.
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