So Delawareonline is going behind a paywall…
… so what? The internet business model of giving away your product for free online was never going to work, and a lot of newspapers went out of business trying to make it work. Before the internet, if you wanted your local newspaper like the News Journal, you paid for it. And it is going to be that way again.
I don’t understand the notion that the public shouldn’t pay for news. If we don’t pay for it, who will? The government? What if you need the government investigated? What if what the government is doing is wrong? Do you think a reporter or a editor or a publisher won’t feel pressure from the government to not report on a certain story, especially if the government is directly involved in the chain of command at a publication?
Corporations? What if there is a horrible story about a product made by that corporation that killed or injured people? What if the story or reporter is critical of something the corporation has done? You think the reporter will stay for long? General Electric and Keith Olbermann?
No, we, the public, have to pay for it if we want good, unvarnished, untainted, unbiased news. If the public demands free or low cost news than it will get shitty or low cost news. Or in other words, the News Journal or any publication by Gannett over the last several years. But if we want to hold the government or politicians or big business to account, we have to pay for it. And if the News Journal or any other publication doesn’t offer the bang for our buck, then we stop paying for it.
But having the public pay for its local news means that the public now has control over what is covered and what is reported, and it is the only real way. So I look on this decision as a chance for the News Journal to improve. So I will pay for the News Journal online. And if the News Journal doesn’t improve, I will stop paying for the News Journal.
SO now I will also be a news pirate. Add that to the list: movies, tv, music, software…news.
I agree with DD. We’ve been dead trees subscribers forever. We’ll probably change that to the online edition plus Delawareonline.
While I have no idea whether the model will work, you get what you pay for.
Piracy is not OK. While some may find it easy to rationalize, it’s stealing. As some of you may know, I produced concerts at the Arden Gild Hall for several years. When I see career musicians and performers struggling in part b/c people are getting their product for free, it just makes me sick. Perhaps this song best makes the point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFle2YoQwWg
Nothing really changes for bloggers. You’ll have your subscriptions and can link to articles, and you are still subject to Fair Use. Readers however will not be able to follow links to the whole story, which is where a lot of the value-added comments come from.
I suggest we crowd-source a list of alternatives for free local news and post it as a permanent page.
wdel.com
communitypub.com
whyy.org
whyy.org/tv12/deltonight.html
etc.
Newspapers, music, books, films… everybody is trying to figure out how to make money in the age of pirate copies and (close) substitutes available for free. All the DRM in the world cannot put the $0.00 close substitute genie back in the bottle.
I’d like too see WDEL news get a higher profile out of this. They do good work.
oh yeah! i forgot textbooks. I dont even feel bad for that one. college textbooks are a ripoff scam.
Puck, are you saying that, if we have a dead-trees subscription, we’ll still be able to access delawareonline?
Commenter Blue Gal reports:
Also, see GannettBlog, which is an independent blog tracking Gannett issues:
http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/heres-new-paywall-faq-for-customers.html
Mark it. They are going down. May take 5 years. But its over. The second they raise my Sunday only rate, I’m out. They are corporate influenced coverage anyway. They will not be able to charge as much for ad rev due to decreased clicks….just a sad death spiral taking its next step.
Good riddance NJ, you frickin’ sucked anyway….
This was inevitable, they have to make a profit or at least break even and free service is not part of that equation. Will I subscribe? No, I’ll continue to get the sunday paper and thats all. Will the paper go out of business as so many others have? Perhaps, perhaps not, it’s a Delaware insitution and part of what makes Delaware the Delaware we all know.
Well, since they are making any money off advertising, guess they need to charge for on-line access. I still like the NY Times version – 20 free articles a month; after that, you have to buy the on-line subscription.
John Young has the text of the letter.
So in the unlikely event you want to comment on a News Journal article, you need a subscription AND a Facebook account.
I suppose I will go back to the old days of getting it out of the box when the mood takes me
then using it to wrap stuff in…..
other than that I can live without it
Heck, when I lived up there, I wouldn’t pay for the News Journal.
I’m not going to start now.
I prefer newspapers that take more than ten minutes to read; if it hadn’t been for Boscov’s, it would have been six pages long, including comics. That’s why I subscribed to the Inky.
Snark aside, I doubt this will do much more than decrease their hit-count without their increasing revenue significantly.
This is obviously self-serving, as the News Journal publishes my cartoons, but here goes. Their most expensive subscription plan is $23 a month. That’s $0.77 cents a day. If we can’t afford to pay that for local journalism, then we’re screwed.
It’s easy to poke fun at the NJ and their Gannett overlords (lord knows I’ve done my share of Gannett bashing), but think about all the local stories that the NJ broke last year alone. With no other significant media source, Delaware would be done a disservice if the NJ had to pull back it’s coverage.
The Community News and the Dover Post are nice, and WHYY and First do some good things, but for local enterprise reporting, the NJ is all we’ve got.
online notification: http://www.delawareonline.com/ez/step1_switch.html
It isn’t just consumers who need to value news, the people who produce it need to lead the way. A news organization that is continually downsized (so that it covers less) and asks its best resources to take furlough days so that it can make sure its shareholders can pay golden parachutes have pretty clearly sent an awful lot of signals that they don’t care much about the news.
I do pay for some sites and I pick up papers (multiple ones) in the store each day I’m home to do so. Home delivery isn’t a real option for me. Even though I read the NJ online, I do pick up the paper pretty often. As Rob notes, .77 each day isn’t much, and they’d better not let advertising get any more aggressive than it already is. But one of the advantages of using places like the NYT for sourcing is that you can get links that don’t deteriorate AND don’t get archived, so that the NYT is always in the conversation. I wish the NJ would do this — there are lots of occasions where we’ve cited their work and a month or to later, link rot has made sure that the NJ no longer is in that conversation.
I like the idea that the more people pay for subscriptions, the more power we take away from the big advertisers. I don’t know if the actual numbers bear this out, but it is a comforting thought. Maybe it will help to think of the fee as something like an NPR pledge drive.
Frank: LOL. That’s one of the things I love about the News Journal: It only takes ten minutes to read. I buy a New York Times or a Washington Post and the thing lies there on my dining room table, half read, mocking me. The News Journal, ten minutes. I’m done. 🙂 Sorry, News Journal. I shouldn’t be so mean, your staff is capable of some very fine investigative reporting when you allow them to do it.
And John Young. Finally, this has been aggravating me and frustrating me for years. I am a paid subscriber to the News Journal, delivered daily, by my wonderful newspaper woman, yet when I get on DelawareOnline and try to search for a an old, or even a relatively recent article, it is not available to me or I am asked to pay for it. I already paid for it, thank you, I just recycled it a while ago and it is “no long available.” Newspapers are struggling to survive and if they want to survive they might be more accommodating to those of us die hards still willing to pay for them, still wiling to pay for home delivery. I am not at all happy about being required to link my Facebook account though. I will have to see how that works but that could be a deal breaker.
The death of professional journalism is quite possible and it saddens and worries me. Anyone with a computer, a few graphics and a minimal degree of literacy can toss something up on the web and call it news and the downward spiral of ignorance, gullibility and misinformation caused by that will hurt us all. I want to see professional journalism survive. I am willing to pay for it because it matters and it is important. But I would also appreciate it if those of us who support and value print journalism were more valued by the newspapers we love.
You can get archived News Journal articles online for free through the NCC public library web site. You can’t distribute them or post them online though, except as Fair Use allows.
That’s a good question though – if I pay my $15/month, does that include articles in the post-30 day archive? Or will they want yet another payment for those?
I wonder how they are going to treat the firewall…WSJ gives you the first paragraph or so, NYT gives a monthly free quota along with a great front page menu.
The News Journal’s been horrible in almost every choice they’ve made for their online product (following Gannett choicing).
If delawareonline just gives me the headline plus the lede, I’ll just treat it like another blog – as a prompt for me to go find the rest of the story somewhere else. That’s basically how I use the Newark Post, which is already behind a paywall – they send me email alerts with a news summary, and if it interests me I go look for the story somewhere else.
The archive thing is an issue. $15/month is a shaky enough proposition as it is, but if that only gets me the last 30 days worth of news, that’s a dealbreaker.
To my students, in Pucks comment you see my “$0.00 close substitute” theory in action. Here the News Journal thinks it is marketing when in fact, it is providing an acceptable free substitute for something it wants to get money for.
They have a big story out this morning – there will be a free quota. Don’t know if they sorted out pay level access to archived material. Their story rot is one of the most severe misjudgements they’ve made. Hits to the web site and length of duration of visits are the usual data for advert-value. If they kept the archives open, we’d be able to direct people to those stories years afterward. People would go online and spend time reading. I wonder if they’ve studied the archive fees vs potential value for open access.
Anyway, I do love the sister paperhood of the Community News. Unfortunately, the Hockessin (NCC) publication lost most of its talent to the Dover Post: Jesse Chaddingdon and Tony Prado. Community News used to rival Chad Livengood when he covered county news. Now it pretty much just gave up on covering NCC.
Look at a recent online Dover Post Prado article. He’s adding hyper-links worthy of any blogger!
http://www.doverpost.com/topstories/x117257897/Kent-County-Levy-Court-sends-wetlands-waiver-for-Nobles-Pond-back-for-review
Here’s why it’s not going to work. I was just skimming through the DelawareOnline headlines and I found one that interested me:
(morons are using Windows). But anyway…
So I imagined, what if this story were behind a paywall? So I googled for hacking dupont chinese, and it turns out the story is from Bloomberg and is widely available. So much for the “value of local news” theory. The News Journal apparently does not have the resources to report this local story (unless perhaps it is buried in the archive).
Same thing happened with the other story that interested me, “Perdue biomass boiler operation proposed.” That story was written by Deborah Gates, who is listed as a “Roving Reporter” for Gannett, based in Dover. But a quick search for Perdue Biomass Boiler turned up multiple articles and press releases from other sources, with all the detailed information I could want.
So, keep feeding me those Google search terms, Gannett. Good luck with that paywall.
Good luck indeed. If the locally produced journalism were offered on a per-story basis, nobody would be coughing up 77 cents a day, unless that’s the price of each article.
This might work for those papers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, where the original journalism makes up the majority of the content. For local newspapers, where the wire copy outweighs the original content, it’s just a way to boost short-term profits so the bean-counters in Virginia can sew an extra panel into their golden parachutes.
How very true Geezer.
It sounds like the ad department should step up their game, online. Oh well, I’ll just read on WDEL.
puck, you’re way off base.
Deborah Gates works for the sister paper, The Daily Times, out of Salisbury, Maryland, not out of Dover. The words “Roving Reporter” appear nowhere, which means you’re just making shit up. That story was picked up from the Times, which covers Salisbury (where Perdue is based) and the eastern shore of Maryland.
The DuPont story was a national piece by Bloomberg – which covers finance and business – and only had a few lines about DuPont.
Just because they’re on the website doesn’t mean they’re local stories by TNJ.
“The words “Roving Reporter” appear nowhere”
Don’t test me. You will lose every time. I don’t make shit up.
“The DuPont story was a national piece by Bloomberg – which covers finance and business – and only had a few lines about DuPont.”
Funny how Dupont chose to share the news of their Chinese breach with Bloomberg but not their hometown paper.
“Just because they’re on the website doesn’t mean they’re local stories by TNJ.”
Um, that was the point of my comment. Gannett is trying to repackage stories from other news organizations and sell it to me for $15/month.
SMFH.
My responses:
– The words “roving reporter” indeed appear nowhere in the story. The link you provided is her personal LinkedIn page, where she can put whatever stuff she wants. Here’s an official Gannett site, which identifies her as a Daily Times reporter (with a 410 area code, not 302, meaning she’s based in Maryland): http://www.delmarvanow.com/apps/pbcs.dll/personalia?ID=dgates&template=pers
– All media outlets repackage stories from other news organizations. No outlet except the NYT or WP can afford to have staffs large enough to fill the entire paper, news broadcast or radio newscast all the time. That’s why they have the AP and Bloomberg. At least half of the stuff on WDEL or your local TV station’s website is from the AP’s broadcast wire – which picks up tons of Delaware stories from TNJ!
– The story of the DuPont hacking was broken in the spring of 2011 by the Anonymous collective. See here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-08/hacking-of-dupont-j-j-ge-were-google-type-attacks-that-weren-t-disclosed.html DuPont did *not* share the information with anyone – it was leaked online. I don’t know if TNJ wrote about it back in the spring because their website doesn’t go that far back. The recent Bloomberg story was what’s called a “follow-up,” or “update.” I wouldn’t expect TNJ to do a local story on some new SEC rules, because it’s effectively hired Bloomberg to do that.
There are plenty of legit things to criticize TNJ about. Your points are not among them.
You totally missed my point, dude. I know about repackaging. I wasn’t criticizing the repackaging – I was criticizing CHARGING for repackaged stories. There are more free repackagers than I can count.
I was describing my subjective newsreading experience when I skimmed TNJ headlines, found two stories that interested me, and figured out I could read them elsewhere just as easily. No need to click on TNJ. Hey, maybe I can make an app or a browser plugin that will intercept a click on a TNJ story, and find it somewhere else for free. That would be cool.
There is enough good local content I am considering paying the $15 bucks, although I am pissed Gannett charges $9.95 everywhere else. Just learned today though that the blogs will also be behind the paywall, so I don’t know what the future holds for them.
No, you misunderstand. EVERYONE charges for repackaging in some way. Print newspapers have a cost associated with them. TV and radio force you to watch or listen to ads. You’re either paying with your pocket change or your time.
All I know is the $15 stays in my pocket instead of TNJ’s.
The Gannett blog reports that TNJ advertised four open editorial positions as part of this commitment to local content. That should just about make up for the dozens of jobs that have been cut there in the past 4-5 years.
And don’t cry too hard for Gannett and the other media companies still in the print business. According to the American Journalism Review, although revenue and profit are down significantly in recent years (due in part to bad management), “The newspaper industry remains highly profitable by comparison with most other businesses. Bad as 2007 has been, the publicly reporting companies still produced an average operating-profit margin of nearly 16 percent in the first half of the year–a level many businesses can never hope to achieve.” (www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4416)
I wonder how this plan from Gannett will work for those of us who get only the Sunday paper. I haven’t subscribed to the daily for about 7 years now and am not likely to do so again.