News should be accessible to everyone—not just to those who can afford it
The case against the online media subscription model
Subscription-based business models are the journalism industry’s current panacea, and for good reason. Advertising is declining—and under attack by Google and Apple. The idea that readers, not advertisers, should be the news industry’s most important customers and relationships makes a lot of sense. And anyway, subscriptions seem like the only option moving forward.
The problem is that this model is not inclusive of everyone—particularly the people for whom access to the news may be most critical. Moreover, putting up barriers to news access will only further fragment our society’s sense of shared reality. People with means will only subscribe to—and thus only read and interact with—news sites that confirm their preconceptions, while others may be left with largely aggregated, ad-supported “content” that, in an effort to attract clicks, is inevitably sensationalized, skewed, or otherwise unreliable.
The main way digital subscriptions work is, of course, by entering a credit card number into an online form. This process may seem simple enough, but it’s not so readily available to everyone. First, you need an internet connection and an internet-enabled device. But if you’re one of a quarter of Americans who don’t have broadband at home, you might not even be able to access the form. If, like 12 percent of Americans, you have a smartphone, but not home broadband, you might not want to spend your limited data allowance loading a newspaper subscription page. And you certainly don’t want to use public devices or unsecured wifi networks to enter sensitive financial data, especially in this era of highly-publicized cyberattacks and malware.
Second, you need a credit or debit card to enter into the form. But if you’re among the 25 percent of households that rely on financial services outside the traditional banking system—like check cashing and money orders—you might not have such a card to use. You might have a prepaid card, but you probably wouldn’t use that for recurring subscriptions like a newspaper. More broadly, such “underbanked” or “unbanked” households tend to be lower-income, and purchasing a relatively expensive newspaper subscription might not be a top priority, anyway.
Yet the demographic groups most likely to be left out of online media subscription models—nonwhite, poorer, less educated—are exactly those who could, and should, benefit the most from the news. Shedding light on what afflicts society’s most marginalized members is perhaps journalism’s highest calling. And the people affected most directly by such work shouldn’t be the ones who can least access it.
Further, subscription models are contributing our society’s waning sense of shared reality. When virtually everybody had access to the same information, people could discuss complex and important issues, trusting that their interlocutors had a baseline of the same trustworthy facts. But now, as Paul Willcocks wrote in October:
Traditional news media have been so cheap as to be almost free. They were hardly perfect, but provided information on a broad basis. And before the paywalls that limited access to newspaper websites, the information they gathered was available for anyone with computer access. … And pre-computers, you could usually find a paper around the office or a coffee shop if you didn’t want to buy one. That’s not true for the information companies operating under the new model. They rely on readers’ payments to survive, and can’t give content away.
The data bears this out—the news has never been more expensive. I checked the weekday newsstand prices for two readily-available papers, the Morristown, NJ Daily Record and the New York Times (local edition). Today, the price of the Daily Record is three times more, and the Times five times more, than their median over the last century.
This is a pernicious trend. After the 2016 presidential election, much has been written about how algorithms and filter bubbles are creating divergent perceptions of society, and how low-quality or intentionally false “news” articles are muddling those perceptions further. Those are grave issues, to be sure. But what have been discussed less—at least in my view—are the (socio-)economic disparities that underlie those phenomena.
As Alan Rusbridger, then the editor of The Guardian, said in a 2009 lecture, “If you universally make people pay for your content it follows that you are no longer open to the rest of the world, except at a cost.” This is particularly troubling because “quality journalism and deep analysis … are among the content most likely to go behind paywalls,” as Jim Macnamara wrote in a 2010 analysis of new media business models, making “some or a lot of journalism closed to many people, particularly those in lower socioeconomic groups.”
It’s funny: As a proud digital native, I never thought I would admire the era of the commonplace print newspaper or the must-watch nightly newscast. On my Apple Watch, I get push notifications with breaking news; on my iPhone, I get instant analysis from top reporters on Twitter; on my iPad, I read the best pieces of writing from around the world with Instapaper and Reeder. I subscribed to the digital editions of my local paper, the New York Times, and other publications without giving them a second thought. I am so immersed in news and information every day that it’s almost hard to imagine anything else. But if I take a step back, I can easily see that this immersion is unusual and privileged—even though it doesn’t have to be.
And as the media industry begins to coalesce towards stricter paywalls and higher prices, finding alternative, more inclusive business models is more urgent than ever. I strongly believe that news should be accessible to everyone, not just to those who can afford it.
I think the prevalence of subscriptions can be attributed, at least in part, to the technical ease of implementing them. News, from the advent of the printing press, has always been enabled by new technological innovations. Today, with standout services like Stripe handling the complexity of digital payments, I know firsthand that it has never been easier to charge people money online. So perhaps what we need are new tools that enable new business models. What if, for example, there were a Stripe for writing grants or, as Melody Kramer has thoroughly explored, enabling different kinds of public media memberships?
From another perspective: More and more news organizations are starting as, or converting to, nonprofits, which I think makes a lot of sense—news is a social good and public service. But they don’t always adopt the revenue strategies of other nonprofits. In general, charities don’t typically ask their beneficiaries to pay for the services they receive—for example, a food bank doesn’t ask people to pay to receive food. For a nonprofit, finding an “economic engine” is a “separate step” from finding a way to create value, as a Stanford Social Innovation Review article notes—exactly the opposite of for-profit businesses. In other words, although nonprofit news organizations may create value for readers through their articles, they shouldn’t assume that readers must pay directly for those articles. Their economic engines can, and perhaps should, be different. “Too few [news] organizations have seriously piloted new earned income strategies,” a 2015 Knight Foundation report concluded. Can technology make implementing novel funding sources just as convenient as embedding credit card forms?
Finally, nine years ago, Shel Holtz, a writer and communications consultant, suggested ten changes that could save print newspapers, including one unusual one: making them free. Actually, it’s not such a novel concept, as he notes, “it’s just new for the mainstream press. The alternative press has been giving its content away for free for decades, relying solely on ads to pay the bills.” Certainly, at this moment—just as we’re starting, grudgingly, to get used to the ubiquity of paywalls—even the idea of making news free again seems foreign and dubious. After all, conventional wisdom holds that it’s impossible, because advertising dollars are drying up. But I think the increasingly real prospect of excluding wide swaths of society from walled gardens of news makes it crucial to consider this possibility. If technology has quashed one way for journalism to be available for cheap—or for free—why can’t it enable many more?
Trustworthy, accessible journalism is fundamental to democracy, and it’s clear we need to find new ways to support it. To me, it’s equally clear that sustainable, inclusive solutions will require thinking outside the media orthodoxy. As Joshua Benton wrote in a Nieman Reports column comparing the unbanked to the “unnewsed”:
Just as many journalists remain puzzled by the media diets of their aunts and uncles back home, some in the banking industry wonder why anyone would prefer to use what they see as obviously inferior services. … But the decisions of customers aren’t driven solely by perceptions of “quality”; they’re also derived from more prosaic factors like customer service, cost, feelings of community and personal connection, and a sense that both sides of the transaction have similar interests at heart.
I strongly believe news organizations must be deliberate about finding ways to include those who have the least access to news, but who could benefit the most from it. Although subscriptions might be part of it, they cannot be the entire solution.
