https://www.npr.org/2022/02/05/1078377406/opinion-remember-reading-the-paper

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Opinion: Remember reading the paper? NPR's Scott Simon laments
newspaper paywalls and wishes there was an easier, cost-effective way
to read a lot of newspapers online without needing so many
subscriptions.
[scott_simo]
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Opinion

 

Opinion: Remember reading the paper?

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February 5, 20228:02 AM ET
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Opinion: Remember reading the paper?

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[gettyimage]
Enlarge this image

A worker at a San Francisco Chronicle printing plant arranges stacks
of freshly printed newspapers in 2007. Its digital version, like that
of so many newspapers', is behind a paywall. Justin Sullivan/Getty
Images hide caption

toggle caption
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

A worker at a San Francisco Chronicle printing plant arranges stacks
of freshly printed newspapers in 2007. Its digital version, like that
of so many newspapers', is behind a paywall.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The road to free information and opinions seems to run into a lot of
paywalls.

Want to finish reading an article? You can, but only if you subscribe
for just $1 for 3 months, which becomes $11.99 a month thereafter,
and into perpetuity, until your credit card expires. Even if it's
after you do.

I have a strong, even personal interest in paying journalists fairly.
But the cost most people have to pay these days if they want to try
to stay informed and enrich their minds with a range of opinions is
pretty steep.

From Cleveland To Boston, Newsrooms Revisit Old Stories To Offer A
'Fresh Start'

Media

From Cleveland To Boston, Newsrooms Revisit Old Stories To Offer A
'Fresh Start'

It's become harder to read more than an article or two in most
publications, which may no longer be the word. News sites, from The
New York Times and The Washington Post to The Des Moines Register,
insist you subscribe. So do Ebony, The New Yorker, The Economist,
Rolling Stone and opinion journals, including The Nation and National
Review, and sports-reporting sites. And of course, there are
proliferating newsletters and extra-access-plus plans, as news
broadcasters begin their own subscription services. They don't crave
an audience, so much as what they call a "customer base."

"You can't do much web grazing of quality content these days without
a paywall clanging shut on you," Jack Shafer wrote last year in
Politico. "What delights publishers about subscriptions is what
everybody from Amazon to Spotify to the Dollar Shave Club to Netflix
love -- the annuity-like reliability of steady revenue."

But the cost of inducing people to subscribe is to make news,
information and a range of opinions available to only those who have
the means to afford and receive them online. This skews the audience
toward what Nikki Usher, a University of Illinois College of Media
associate professor, calls the "rich, white, and blue," as in
left-leaning.

Stop The Presses! Newspapers Affect Us, Often In Ways We Don't
Realize

The Coronavirus Crisis

Stop The Presses! Newspapers Affect Us, Often In Ways We Don't
Realize

The political and social divides, which so many decry, may begin
between those who can and those who can't afford access to a wide
range of fact-checked, accurate information.

Disinformation, of course, is utterly free.

Newspapers and magazines often got ink on your fingers. But they were
cheap. Anyone with pocket change, rich, poor, students or
job-seekers, could buy a copy of a magazine with Princess Diana or
Oprah Winfrey on the cover or a newspaper when the headline said MAN
WALKS ON MOON, or, yes, HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.

The internet has made news and views of all kinds, from all over the
world, available on screens we can keep in our pockets. But so many
paywalls have pulled costly shades over those screens.

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[scott_simo]
Special Series

Simon Says

NPR's Scott Simon Shares His Take On Events Large And Small

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