In May, David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who created the television shows The Wire and Treme, reiterated his longtime belief that paywalls—and paywalls alone—could save the newspaper business. Our readers reacted—and Simon punched back.
How much longer are we going to have people idiotically proclaim that readers always paid for the news until the big bad Internet came along and newspapers started giving it away for free? Readers never paid for the news. Advertisers did. And now because media companies can’t figure out a way to make 20 percent profits again, we have to pay? I don’t think so. —Anna Tarkov
I will not call you idiotic. I will refrain from any ad hominem. But I will simply state that you are factually wrong. And I have 30 years of mailing monthly checks for my home subscriptions to The Baltimore Sun and The New York Times as evidence. Similarly, there were all those quarters tossed into newspaper boxes and money handed over at newsstands.
The news was always a purchased item for consumers until the advent of the Internet. This is simply fact. If you mean to suggest that circulation costs didn’t actually cover the newsstand costs or the costs of subscription, you are correct. Circulation was a loss leader; advertising was the revenue stream in the pre-Internet age. But this is not the dynamic currently. Currently, the revenue stream of advertising is disappearing and circulation—given that it is digital—is not preordained to be a loss leader. No cutting down trees, no printing costs, no trucks, no truck drivers, no gas, so even if newspapers charged half the cost of a monthy hardcopy subscription, they have the potential to yield profits. And they are yielding profits. The revenue stream from subscriptions online at the NYT is indeed substantial and growing.
Your argument seems to be that newspapers should simply give away their product and die—and indeed they are dying. You offer no alternative but slow suicide. But it costs money to produce a comprehensive news report—lots of money.
It’s the paywalls or death. That the horse has been out of the barn for ten years, and that there are people who will not purchase news—these are not reasons for the industry to take the only viable step to solve an existential nightmare…. If there is another revenue stream beside advertising and subscription revenues, I am ready to consider it. But advertising is not coming back to newspapers on the same scale—Craigslist and department-store consolidation have seen to that, among other trends. The only thing left is to see whether the product is, well, a product, if it will sell. If so, there is a revenue stream for digital journalism, and we can pay for more reporting and editing. If not, better to know right away and cease this long death march of layoffs and buyouts and newspaper reductions. —David Simon
This is not about anything I've seen in the CJR. I was just wondering if I'm the only person who noticed the lack of media coverage, both local and national, in the shooting death of Kenneth Chamberlain by the White Plains police last November.
Mr. Chamberlain was a black, 68-year old retired Marine. His medical emergency alert transponder had been set off at 5 a.m. When the operator could not reach him on the phone, she contacted the White Plains police following company policy.
The police pried his door open, tasered him and shot bean bags at him, all in spite of his protests that he was all right and did not want or need medical attention and did not want the police to enter his apartment. They then fired two rounds from a revolver that knocked him to the ground.
He was taken to the White Plains Hospital emergency room where he was pronounced dead at 7:09 a.m.
The Westchester County District Attorney's office eventually yielded to community pressure and presented the case to a grand jury which failed to indict any of the policemen. The Chamberlain family is pursuing a civil case against the White Plains Police. They have also asked the state Attorney General and the Justice Department to investigate this case. Unfortunately, Eric Holder seems to have his own troubles these days.
The lack of media attention to this case when compared to the non-stop coverage of the Trayvon Martin case in Sanford, FL, is astonishing. For example, the NY Times relegated this story to a few articles in one of its regional editions. And, where is the national coverage on this after the feeding frenzy devoted to the Martin Case?
#1 Posted by rich korn, CJR on Mon 16 Jul 2012 at 12:41 AM
David Simon asks a very good question when he asks if the Press Release (oops! David would call it journalism) is a product people are willing to pay money for out of their own pockets.
The economic problems of newspapers are caused more by their lack of actual journalism than some mythic lack of advertisers, or paying consumers of news. Those customers are going to where meaningful original content comes from. Wiki leaks had people contributing money without a paywall until the government cut them off. That is real journalism that real people are really willing to pay for.
Press release journalism should be paid for by the companies and campaigns releasing the "information".
#2 Posted by timothywmurray, CJR on Fri 27 Jul 2012 at 12:48 PM
"Timothywmurray uttered the damning truth. Shun him for this profane gaffe!"
#3 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Fri 27 Jul 2012 at 10:42 PM
Here is one of many items on Kenneth Chamberlain's killing that can be found at Democracy Now. It is indeed being ignored by most of the media and needs desperately to be covered.
http://m.democracynow.org/columns/1319
#4 Posted by Bill Michtom, CJR on Sun 29 Jul 2012 at 12:58 PM