GhostalmediaPaywalls aren’t a new thing for journalism. Newspaper delivery fees were a paywall.
reality_boyYes and no. Newspapers could be read the next day, after the original purchaser was done with it. And it was easy for a restaurant or business to share newspapers among many clients. Plus of course radio still provided free news that was quality.
The big problem now is that the best news sources are the most locked down. And the worst news sources are the most open. So it is difficult for a quality piece to make the rounds. Even if a link to an article could be shared for free, even if the website was locked down, things would be a lot better.
Finally newspapers charged for the cost of printing but made money off of advertising and classifieds. There is very little cost (per view) to digital publishing. If newspapers had embraced the Web 20 years ago they could have been Facebook or eBay, rather than having all there core revenue fall away.
If newspapers had embraced the Web 20 years ago they could have been Facebook or eBay, rather than having all there core revenue fall away.
Could you expand on this? I have a hard time imagining high quality journalism outcompeting social media, since its content is simply so much slower to produce and less entertaining.
As someone who worked IT in a newspaper around 20 years ago: Higher ups would basically laugh at you if you even mentioned web browsing or that they might want make their news more available online.
In their minds it was a fad that would come and go just like 3d movies keep doing over and over. They refused to see computers as anything beyond strictly electronic typewriters with a fancy preview. The only reason the photography department even got proper monitors and such, is because it was cheaper than having to keep developing film on-site.
They still had monochrome black/green monitors around 2000. And they were only replaced because it became unsuable for anything but the same text editor, since the menu options were so burned in you couldn’t read the menu on other programs.