That genie’s flown: Part 2

The paid vs. free debate over newspapers flares up every now and then but, as I wrote in Part 1 of this post a couple of days ago:

The basic idea I have is that the logic that says newspapers made a mistake when they first jumped on to the web and gave their stuff away is flawed and ignores the reality of the net. Regardless of what they had done, I suspect, free would have emerged as the underlying reality of web-based journalism.

Newspapers made lots of mistakes when they leaped on to the net in the mid-’90s, the biggest of which (in hindsight) was viewing it as just another delivery method and not, in effect, a whole new medium. No one’s to blame for that: lots of mistakes were made by lots of folks. The potential for the web was/isn’t fully clear.

Most newspapers that started out charging for access to their journalism abandoned that tack, or modified it to paywall only a subset of articles or archives, when it was clear most readers weren’t that interested. While there are exceptions — the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal are the most cited — almost all newspapers offer their stuff free of charge.

The NYT and WSJ are held up as examples of the idea that people will pay for either unique and or high-quality stuff, but I’m not sure that’s the whole story. In both cases, those who have paid for online subscriptions, have done so as much to buy brand as journalism. And I’d argue that readers are not buying for unique coverage. They are paying a package of journalism: the combination of excellent reporting and commentary, and broad-based coverage of news and/or the economy. Much of the actual information is available, free of charge, from any number of sources. And, if it isn’t when first published in the Times, it soon will be.

That thought takes me a little closer to an understanding of why free newspapers are likely the norm for the ‘net regardless of what publishers did or didn’t do a decade ago or in the years since.

One more piece of this, perhaps minor, is how copyright works. Because copyright deals with the expression of an idea, and not the idea itself, newspapers are in a very different positions than, for instance, the entertainment industry. Copyright applies to everything in a newspaper from the front page to the back, but only the actual written form. Any (unethical, immoral) body can take the content of a newspaper, substantially rewrite and re-present the factual information, and publish it without fear of lawsuit. A record company may own a song — from lyrics right through the actual cut — but newspapers only control the particular way the words are strung together.

Enough for now. I’ll try to focus my thinking a little more and wrap this all up in a third part in a day or two.

TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, INTERNET, SUBSCRIPTIONS