It's Lexikon — Kill the paywalls

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Kill the paywalls

Finally, after five years of singing this tune at the top of my lungs (I know it’s annoying, sorry y’all), others have begun chiming in. We’re not alone, paywall hackers! Stand strong!

Media critic, professor, and local blogger Dan Kennedy, in a great commentary piece on WGBH, notes some thoughts from other allies (see below), and he also makes this excellent point, which has always been my big kicker… (Because millennials pioneered this kind of content digestion, OWMs mostly ignored us when we pointed it out, but I think the Globe’s recent delivery crisis has given everyone a swift kick in the pants and something to think about.)

Kennedy writes, “…paywalls interfere with the way we now consume news—skipping around the Internet, checking in with multiple sources. To wall off content runs contrary not just to what news consumers want but to the sharing culture of the Internet. The Globe has had quite a bit of success is selling digital subscriptions—about 90,000, according to the September 2015 audit report. But what will happen when the paper ratchets the price up to $1 a day…?”

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Originally posted by notsofasttimes

Print and digital subscriptions will absolutely, in no way, ever again, at all, be able to sustain the industry. Anyone who believes differently is just plain wrong. Like, I don’t know how else to explain to news execs that doubling down on investments in the daily distribution of dead trees is idiocy. It just is. 

In Kennedy’s piece, he links to a Medium post by Richard Tofel headlined “The sky is falling on print newspapers faster than you think” – so at least they get it. 

That thoughtful post includes this helpful chart that shows the decline in print subscriptions of the nation’s major metro dailies over the past two years. 

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This, taken together with the undeniable fact that paywalls are terrible, shows that there is simply no way to rationally continue to believe that digital and print subscriptions alone will sustain newspapers and, more importantly, journalists.

But hang tight, there may be another way!

Some years ago, I had a conversation with a legacy print reporter who asked me my thoughts on how the news industry would support itself. I replied that it would fracture unrecognizably, but that each outlet that ended up floating to the top and surviving this Hunger Games-style bloodbath would be sustained by a combination of (at least) five separate revenue streams. 

1. Subscriptions

2. Micro-payments

3. Foundation Funding/Non-profit help

4. Ads, native ads, regional ads, and white papers

5. The secret sauce. An x-factor that can be anything. 

I’m sticking to this theory.

Luckily, I don’t have to guess what 5 might be, because here is a big list of 52 great revenue ideas that Josh Stearns put together. (H/T to my colleague Kevin Grant for sharing)

So what does this all mean? 

KILL THE PAYWALLS, re-invest in those R&D labs, and move on. 

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