The Pay Wall

I'm conflicted. As someone who makes a living in the media industry, I need people to pay for the content I produce. As a consumer, I appreciate that the Internet offers multiple sources to get news - for free.

From personal experience, I used to subscribe to daily newsletters from Variety, an entertainment trade publication. A few months ago they began putting their content behind a paywall. I always found them to be a pretty useful site, but since I also get similar information from The Hollywood Reporter and Television Week, I decided it was no longer worth it to me to subsribe to their newsletters, no matter how enticing the headlines looked that came in my inbox.

I hear now that the New York Times is moving toward a paywall mode. Thanks to the advent of blogs, it could be possible to get a regurgitated, shorter version of the most important stories of the day, but I think the Times' content just might be good enough to pay for. I value the diversity of the stories they tell, their multimedia pieces and the fact that they are probably thee most reputable source on news and information.

On the other hand, imagine how slighted I felt when I went to the newsstand and purchased Essence magazine's "first ever brand new special hot hair issue," only to receive an e-mail a couple of days ago with a photo gallery of ALL the hairstyles I just paid to see. That, my friends, is NOT valuable to your consumer. If you're going to ask a person to pay, it has to be something they can't get anywhere else. You can't just take what you printed and dump it online and call it multimedia.

At my organization and others around the country, I know there are discussions about how - not if- we begin to ask people to pay for the content we've heretofore been giving away for free.  And this has me conflicted. I want as many people to read my work as possible. But if I write the same story that channel 10 runs tonight at 6, why should someone pay to read what they can watch for free? Or if it's the same story your friends have re-tweeted all day. I can assure you, nine times out of 10, my story is better, more researched and accurate, etc. But the mere fact that I'm asking people to pay for is throwing up a roadblock, I think. Especially because my role is to write content for young professionals. Do me a favor, tell me the number of people you know ages 20 to 30 with a newspaper subscription, online or in print?

Exactly. So, I, like many other media professionals, am kinda confused.