The Globe‘s gone pay.
On the one hand, it’s an obvious move. Of course we should be paying. We paid for newspapers, right? We’re getting millions of dollars in invested talent, experience and other forms of journalistic infrastructure every time we type “theglobeandmail.com” into our wee Google machines.
On the other hand, they’ve been giving this stuff away for more than a decade, going on two. They’ve devalued themselves so much, they may have to re-audition for our cash, and they’ve given no indication they’ll be doing anything like that. After all, The New York Times didn’t, and the Globe story on their new system mentioned them five times (six if you count the Stackhouse article on the subject).
Related: Is it Journalism’s Job to Check the Facts For Us?
Christopher Hitchens was a Journalist
The Globe and Mail to Charge for Online Content
The reason they mentioned the Times so much is that the Times paywall is the one that works. Or at least, the one that doesn’t work the least. That is to say, it makes money, but it doesn’t make up for lost ad revenue, which puts the paper in a negative position. And it’s not the start of something new, this paywall. It’s the preservation of something old, trying to make up money in the most straightforward, simplest — one could even say bone-headed — way possible. It’s status quo thinking, status quo acting, and you may have noticed, the way information is created and distributed these days is as far away from the status quo as the Globe‘s chances of making a New York Times business model work.
I wish the Globe, and the Star, and all the papers in the world the very best of luck (except maybe the Sacramento Bee, a formerly decent paper that seems to have gotten into the business of publishing press releases online; it may go out of business now, if it likes). These are confusing times, to be sure. But I wonder if they’ve even heard of skunk works. In the media biz they’re in, they’d be awfully cheap affairs, and they’d be fun, just the thing that would get people excited about their grey old media conglomerates. They wouldn’t even have to read all of Tim Harford’s recent book, the one that spells out exactly what they should be doing, though he doesn’t spend much time talking about media at all, as I recall. They could just read the bit — and it’s excerpted everywhere, they wouldn’t even have to buy the book — about Henry Cave-Brown-Cave, a 1930s British bureaucrat who decided it mightn’t be a bad idea to throw £10,000 at a barmy idea for a fighter plane that had virtually no chance of succeeding because, hell, war was coming and they needed all the help they could get. I won’t spoil the ending for them. Let’s just say it was £10,000 quite well spent.
Journalism has a number of assets it’s currently actually paying good money to strop itself of. One of the biggest ones is talent. I don’t know the circumstances of Mathew Ingram’s departure, but they were idiots to let it happen, just as the Star was to push Philip Marchand out. These papers are getting rid of people they’ve invested millions in over their careers, and those millions have resulted in a very tangible benefit. These people know what they’re talking about. In their place, they’re keeping, and hiring more, young people, under two assumptions, one correct, one disastrous. They are correct in assuming young people cost less. They do. Much. They’re the scabs of every work force. The only reason the rest of the labour community puts up with them is because they figure they’ll be the next generation, carry on the good work, learn from their elders and change the world and their various industries for the better. Also, they have a great tendency, at least in the first several months of their employment, to get you donuts.
But look at young people in traditional journalism right now. They’re not being encouraged to take advantage of their new perspectives on the industry, perspectives they may not even know they have. They’re being shoved, like marshmallows into a Coke bottle, into those old journalistic molds. And some of them are doing remarkably well. Brendan Kennedy at the Star comes immediately to mind, and Daniel Dale at the same paper. But they’re not as good as the people who have been doing it for decades. And those people, who in earlier times would have either actively or passively mentored the newbies, are increasingly no longer there.
What does that leave us with? A bunch of kids knocking around in an old cardboard box while their little friends, the ones who didn’t go into journalism, are off playing with all the new toys, fun toys with names like Quora, Curbed, Reddit and EveryBlock. Stijn Debrouwere also pointed me to Sparkfun, an online electronics store that writes helpful sales copy that’s no ad copy, and does weekly vlogs that, all together, make them very much like a niche media organization that has a built-in profit model that doesn’t involve trying to make people pay for something they can get for free.
There’s a fundamental problem that I have not seen any paper I read address. The thing they’re trying to charge money for is no longer valuable. News breaks on Twitter. News that pertains more or less directly to my life makes it onto Facebook within an hour, often much less. For everything else, there’s Wikipedia. All these things are free. Newspapers had something valuable — all those reporters with all that training being all over the world understanding everything. But they gave that away. They gave it away for so long they could no longer afford to have them. So now, for the most part, they don’t. We have Doug Saunders covering all of Europe. He does it well, but he’s only one man. We have Stephanie Nolen, first covering Africa, now India, once again extraordinarily well, but as sparsely as you’d expect even a very talented and hard-working someone covering an entire continent with 20 per cent of the world’s population on it would.
They have to find new valuable things that people want to pay for, not try to convince us that we need to pay for things because we should. We will only ever pay for things we either have to or that we want to. Should doesn’t enter into it.
What do they have to sell us? Experience, context, filters. They’ve been buying out the wrong people. They should be getting rid of the movie reviewers, the health writers, all that service journalism they’ve been piling money onto in bright new sections that are mostly called Life and that, in a neat little knifely twist, are leading directly to their host papers’ deaths. As Debrouwere points out (I hope you read his piece, if you haven’t followed a link earlier, follow it now), why would I want to read a Life writer telling me how to eat heart healthy when I’ve got some of the best medical researchers and practitioners on the planet at my fingertips? Reports on these sorts of subjects used to be our gateways to the experts. Increasingly, we can get our information from them as easily as the reporters can. What we need are journalists who are experts themselves, people who have been speaking to other experts so long, so widely and so well, that they become resources themselves, finely tuned filters, well ground lenses.
I would have felt a lot better about this paywall announcement if it had been preceded by some recognition, perhaps even a plan, or better still, some evidence of new value for the new dollars they’re asking for. As it stands, until I get convinced otherwise, I don’t think I’ll be signing up.
________
Bert Archer writes for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter: @bertarcher.
For more, follow us on Twitter: @TorontoStandard, or subscribe to our newsletter.
