When I was interning at The Courier Mail, around two months ago, on my very first day, they introduced news+. News+ is an attempt to get readers to pay for digital journalism. The Courier Mail was merely following in the footsteps of many other news organisations who charge for news by using paywalls, subscription based services and apps. In Australia alone, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Sun (also under the news+ brand) all charge for news. Sometimes, they also add 'premium content' to entice readers into paying the small fees. Yesterday it was announced that The Sun would be joining The Times as another British newspaper to charge for content. For more detail about which newspapers charge for content, see Darren Davidson's recent article in The Australian.
Obviously, these payment systems are not foolproof and there are often ways around the subscription services. But regardless of how easy or difficult it is to trick the services into thinking you have paid, one question remains: should we, society, have to pay for online news?
When I asked my roommate this question, she said no. When I asked her why, she said that while she understood all of the reasons why we should pay for news, she doesn't believe you should have to pay for news. She said that people benefit when they read news and if they stop because of costs or because they are lazy, it is not benefiting society. She believes that you should not have to pay to find out what is going on in the world.
While that is a good point, I have a few counter-arguments.
Firstly, there would not be news without journalists. There would not be the concept of news without people to spread it around. We all know what is considered the oldest profession in the world, but I would venture that journalism is a close second. Think about it: if there was no one, not a reporter on tv, not a person on Twitter, not someone in the streets, to tell you what is happening, there is no such ideal of 'news'. We only understand what 'news' is (current, interesting, new information) because a journalist has decided it is worthy of people to know. Without them, there would just be information. And loads of it.
Secondly, working on the notion that journalism is an old profession, I can almost guarantee that something is not given away for nothing. In other words, even when 'news' was not known as such, people would only spread relevant information if they got something in return. Journalists work hard to create news - they have to collate loads of information, determine what is relevant to society and source it. You cannot expect something for nothing, and therefore you should not get any news, be it on tv, in a newspaper or on the internet, without paying.
Finally, I disagree with the idea that you should not have to pay to find out what is going on in the world. Sure, in a perfect world we would all tell each other everything that is important to our lives. But we also wouldn't maim and murder, keep secrets from out families, or illegally download Game of Thrones. But we don't live in a perfect world.
On the topic of illegal downloads I find my point. We have, in the words of Reuters Institute, a "legacy of free online news provision". News organisations are dealing with generations of people who grew up with the idea that the internet was free, all its content was free, and the internet was in fact useful to help you get other (usually paid) services for free (such as Game of Thrones). I am not going to discuss the morality of using the internet to get free tv or music, because we all do it, but I am going to discuss the fact that when people go on to the internet, they expect content for free.
Which I believe is what my roommate was trying to say: the internet is free and should remain so. So here I must quote Alec Liu, who wrote about how The New York Times encourages citizens to pay for news.
"We were trained to expect all of this stuff [online news] to be free, but it's really
not. It's totally unsustainable. Now we have to be trained back, but
we're already hooked on a bad habit, junkies for online content we never
had to pay for that's propped up by ads no one looks at."
He is right - what needs to change is the idea that everything on the internet is free. If we had started by paying for news content, we would not know the difference and we would not expect free content. Reuters Institute backs this up in their annual Digital News Report, by noting that people are more willing to pay for news online in countries where there is no legacy of free news provision.
Furthermore, as others have said, how can you feasibly start charging people for news when it is something they can get for free? Even if, by some miracle, every news organisation in the world decided to have paid-only online content, how can you make people pay for news when they can still get their news from television and social media?
I don't know the answers to these questions and I don't know how to change people's minds about paid content on the internet. Maybe eventually people will come round to the idea and everyone will just pay for online news. As Mona Zhang noted in her article on tablet users and paying for news, it happened with television - thousands of people each year happily pay for cable, when there are plenty of television shows on free-to-air.
Anyway, it's not all bad news. New figures released by The New York Times show their digital subscriptions have increased by 35 per cent from last year. Perhaps all of these arguments about whether or not we should pay for online news is irrelevant - one day, after the plausible demise of newspapers, all online news organisations may require payment and we will simply accept it. Furthermore, our children will not know any better, and their legacy will not be one of free content, but of paid content.
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