“Erect a paywall and you immediately cut yourself off from much of the web community. You disable the vast majority of people from recommending, commenting, linking, quoting and discussing” (Moore, 2010). You “suffocate” networked journalism, and this limits the chance of individual journalists to build their own ‘brand’. It ties them, in a way, to a specific publication.
As a journalism student, this seems like a pretty poor deal for me. Sure, as the many of the readings emphasised, The New York Times has managed to find a way to eke out some money from paywalls, but the outlook overall remains pretty bleak, especially when you consider that Murdoch’s 2010 introduction of a paywall system at The Times and The Sunday Times resulted in a 90% collapse of traffic. I’d rather take my chances, thanks, than be tied to the success or failure of one publication.
In the week two lecture Andrew was discussed (with reference to Socrates’ concerns about the rise of literacy) how writing is less interpersonal than oral communication, which can result in a disconnection from the work with the author. He went on to say how in the digital age texts can change, answer back, and take on immediacy through functionality such as reader comments, retweets, and collaborative publishing like Wikipedia. So, while there is the possibility that a journalist can be disconnected from their work through the new digital dissemination processes at play on the (open) web, there is also, as Moore (2010) points out, the possibility of gathering news from readers, discovering what they are interested in, and building a relationship that is impossible in the context of relative anonymity to be found in a corporate news-room. This relative anonymity of journalists to their readers is maintained by a paywall system, but can be opened up and made available to more than just a few popular columnists through social media and the web. For example, I am accessing a public as a freelance journalist with a niche interest in coal seam gas; this would not be possible without Twitter.
Despite this, I don’t want to be a citizen-journalist, and part of the brand that I want to build is one of credibility and rigorous fact-checking. That’s why I am really interested in Moore’s idea of attaching metadata to news articles.
I recently listened to the ABC’s Media Report’s discussion of how copyright law around news photography is under threat from small publications which apparently pinch pictures off Fairfax and News Corp, thereby undermining the viability of professional news photographers. It was suggested that the best way to deal with the issue was to introduce a streamlined licencing system which involved a watermark or something, which would disappear if the licence was paid for. As someone who’s going to be facing similar challenges to this, I’m wondering how technology such as Hnews could be extended in a similar way.
I don’t know the answer, because I don’t want to stop people sharing, liking, discussing, (etc). However, I do think that to begin to devise a way of funding professional journalism that’s compatible with a networked environment necessarily involves some sort of understanding and tracking of where that work goes and, who, and how, it is accessed. I’d also prefer if I had access to that sort of data, not just a publication I work for, so that I can make the most of the opportunities presented by a networked web.
Sources:
Moore, Martin (2010) How metadata can eliminate the need for pay walls, PBS, August 18, <http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/08/how-metadata-can-eliminate-the-need-for-pay-walls230/> accessed 13 August 2014.
Ingram, Mathew (2010) It’s official: News Corp.’s paywalls are a bust, Gigaom, November 2, <http://gigaom.com/2010/11/02/news-corp-paywall/> accessed 13 August 2014.
Aedy, Richard (2014) Copying and publishing photos in Australia without permission, ABC Radio National < http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/mediareport/ripping-off-photos-in-australia—is-it-really-22fair-use223f/5654736> accessed 7 August 2014.
2090 Thom 