Recognizing that giving content away for free may not be the most lucrative business model, this week The Boston Globe joined the ranks of some other regional and national newspapers by announcing that it will launch a subscriber-only, fee-based website next year.
Since 2008, more Americans have accessed news online for free than have paid for it by buying newspapers or magazines, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. It costs money to deliver reliable and quality news, and as the Internet has allowed readers to avoid paying for news access, the news industry has struggled to stay afloat.
In recent years, the rise of online news aggregators has wreaked havoc on the news industry, as sites like Google News and the Huffington Post take copyrighted content from multiple sources and make it available in one place at no cost to consumers. The legality of these aggregators' existence has become a controversial topic of late.
While many news aggregator services argue that they drive traffic to the websites of other news organizations, thus offering them a net benefit, news providers clearly do not appreciate this "service": Both the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse have filed lawsuits against news aggregators over the past five years. By using aggregators, Web surfers have significantly less incentive to browse individual news websites and often just read the first couple lines of an article as displayed on the aggregator site, skipping the original news organization's site altogether. As a result, those individual sites bring in less ad revenue.
In order to survive in the Internet age, newspapers like the Globe must come up with creative ways to bring in new revenue. By maintaining free access to local news, sports and weather information on its current website and requiring subscriptions for its new site — which will feature all the content from the print edition, including all news and features, commentary and photographs — the Globe hopes to maintain readership and save itself from bankruptcy.
Whether people will be willing to pay for this premium content remains to be seen. While papers like The Wall Street Journal have successfully convinced subscribers to pay for online material by offering high-quality, specialized content that cannot be obtained elsewhere, the more localized Globe content may not have enough of an audience to attract sufficient subscribers.
While some argue that sharing as much information as freely as possible can only benefit society, if news organizations are unable to profit, the overall quality of reporting will undoubtedly decrease. As long as media consumers feel that it is not "worth it" to pay for their online news, papers like the Globe will continue to face economic uncertainty and find it impossible to continue quality reporting. While the transition may take time, all newspapers and magazines will probably ultimately need to charge for their online content.
People have been buying print newspapers and magazines in the United States for hundreds of years, and if we want continued access to independent, accurate and timely professional reporting, we're going to have to keep paying for it.
