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How much do I want to pay for being a newsgeek?

There's a great little interview with Ally Ross from The Sun in today's Media Guardian.

This bit of the article intrigued me..

"He doesn't get the same online feedback/debate/abuse as other papers' TV critics because his reviews – along with the columns of some of the newspaper's other big-name writers – are not on its website. I wanted to find out from the Sun why its best-known columnists are not online, and whether it is testing things out in preparation for an extension of the paywall, but no one at News International wanted to talk to me. Ross himself is remarkably unfussed about missing out on readers by not being online. He started in the industry before online news was popular and he leaves all that kind of thing to other people. "I trust they know what they're doing," he says."

The Guardian like other news outlets have recently seems amazed by the decision by News International to put paywalls up for their online portfolio with the main argument, it seems, being that you're stopping a wider audience from seeing your content.

Maybe I've been around media-based capitalists for too long, but the question that screams out to me is what are outlets like the Guardian and the Telegraph doing NOT charging for their content? Surely we've had things like this for free for too long when we're starting to see access to people hard work as a right rather than a service to be paid for.

This doesn't extend to the BBC because, obviously, we've already paid for that...and maybe that's why the papers continue to give their content away, the fear being that they would lose potential advertisers on both fronts (if the BBC are allowing you to see their brilliant news and sport coverage for free, why would I pay for either the paper or the online version?)

Maybe I'm part of the problem. I'm more than happy for newspapers to place their content behind a paywall but I won't ever consider paying for it online, I'd rather buy a paper.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/23/ally-ross-sun-tv-critic

Comments

John Medd said…
You and me both FatManc. That is, until the one legged newspaper vendor at the top of Acme Street has got nothing to sell anymore. Buying a paper is up there with the 3 Ss as part of my daily routine. And how long 'til the Paywall becomes the outer Paywall with a top up fee payable to scale the inner Paywall? Thin end of the wedge and all that.
1:31 pm
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