Let’s talk about paywalls!
Paywalls are those pesky things that prevent you from reading articles on certain sites without a subscription. There are different levels of paywalls — hard, soft and medium. A soft paywall may give you 15 articles a month while a hard paywall gives you zero.
A frequent criticism of paywalls are that they prevent people from getting the news they need to be well informed, engaged citizens. It can be super frustrating when you’re looking for information and you hit a paywall.
But, the things is — they’re necessary. Before the internet, there was no such thing as “free news,” at least not on a major, print-based scale. In fact, in the early days of internet, free online content was seen as a form of advertisement to incentivize people to buy subscriptions to the print publications. But then the internet exploded, and people came to expect that they should receive their news for free and that’s caused some BIG issues for journalism. Offering free content online is literally known in the industry as “the original sin” of journalism.
The way to bring down paywalls is, you guessed it, to pay. Subscriptions help pay printing fees and pay the reporters, editors and designers that produce the news. Quality journalism requires quality journalists, and those reporters deserve a decent salary (even though they usually don’t get one these days). Without a stready stream of income, papers let go more expensive, experienced reporters and may eventually shut down all together.
So, what can you do? In a lot of cases, buy local! Lots of local papers are part of larger wire services, like the Associated Press, meaning buying a digital and/or print subscription can get you both local and national news all in one place. Even if the national coverage is limited to just one page in print, there’s typically a lot more coverage online.
Don’t have a local paper? (That’s a whole other discussion about news deserts, but that’s another post.) Pick your favorite publication, such as the Washington Post or the New York Times, and buy a subscription. That money gets you valuable, high quality coverage and makes it possible to pay the people who make that coverage so good. A lot of places offer special deals for students or have discounted prices for your first year of purchase. As a student, for example, I pay $1/month for the Washington Post.
But, what if you’re super, super low on cash? You can check out the Associate Press website! They’re free, super credible and don’t have a paywall. But if you have the money to subscribe somewhere, please do — especially to local papers that are struggling so much right now. Quality, well-researched journalism is essential, but it takes money so we need to do everything we can to support those doing the job well.
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