Are Newspaper Paywalls Starting to Crumble?

Well, Maybe Not Yet, But....

Ever since paywalls became the new black for newspapers, they have acquired some rather ardent detractors as well as defenders.
In the latter category are The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, which have profited handsomely by putting up digital gates. The Times now has nearly 676,000 digital subscribers--also figuring in The International Herald Tribune--while the Journal, a paywall pioneer, has nearly 900,000.
But those papers have oodles of unique content--some of it exclusively digital--that is worth reading and paying for. The same can't be said for most newspapers, though they sure as hell want to make their case. Hundreds of newspapers now have some kind of paywall.
However, for many, that's a problem. They're creating a digital divide at the same time they're cutting staff and content.
All of Gannett's 80 community newspapers have a metered system on their websites. But have you read any of these papers lately? Feh. There's not much there there. And yet Gannett wants you to pony up anyway.
And while early numbers showed that revenue gains from digital subs at Gannett made up for print advertising losses, that may not be sustainable if print subscribers--faced with price increases and shrinking papers--exit more quickly than digital readers enter. Ditto for advertisers. At my local Journal-News in New York's northern suburbs, weekday circulation is 66,000. It was 77,000 just two years earlier. Do you really think digital revenue is making up the difference? Of course not. That's why the J-N laid off 11 percent of its staff in August.
Now the headlong rush to digital gold is being reassessed. First, it was the San Francisco Chronicle that decided to make everything on sfgate.com free again. Now, it's the Dallas Morning News that has signaled retreat. It dropped its paywall in favor of an enhanced experience for "premium subscribers."
How that'll be received remains to be seen (it's free for print subscribers), but unless it's a big-time game-changer, don't expect readers to come a flocking. After all, the reason the DMN dropped its paywall wasn't to be nice. Rather, it bombed with readers. As the paper's CEO said, it didn't create a "massive groundswell" of new subscribers. Quite a euphemism that.
So while the air of inevitability may not be sucked out of the paywall equation just yet, the numbers still have to add up to make it stick. As the San Francisco and Dallas papers have proved, that's a lot easier said than done.

Journal-News Takes Unwarranted Flak over Gun Map

Wheezing Gannett Paper Shows Signs of Life Fulfilling Its Journalistic Mission

You know it's a slow week when a newspaper becomes news. And you know it's a really slow week when that newspaper is The Journal-News, the underachieving (to put it charitably) Gannett property serving New York's northern suburbs (and a former employer of mine from way back when).
The J-N fell into the media's crosshairs this week following publication of an intriguing map that showed readers the names and addresses of registered gun owners in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties.
All in all, a pretty cool idea for a paper that's usually devoid of inspiration. Not surprisingly, lots of folks are in a tizzy over this information, and not just the nattering nabobs of negativism at the NRA.
While waiting for my car to be fixed this morning, the TV in the waiting room was turned to Fox & Friends, where substitute co-host Clayton Moore, who will never be mistaken for a rocket scientist, just shook his head and said it's "wrong" what the paper did. His compadres on the couch, Kelly Wright and Juliet Huddy were also doing their "tsks, tsks" and expressing as much outrage as they could muster without a second cup of coffee.
That's been typical of much of the coverage I've seen, which includes useless person-on-the-street interviews that make no mention of the First Amendment or public record laws.
The value of this information is certainly arguable. At best, the map is an interesting sidebar to Newtown. But the fact that some of your friends and neighbors are legally exercising their Second Amendment rights as currently interpreted by the courts is not terribly newsworthy in an of itself.
And the Journal-News could have handled the contretemps a little better. I'm not sure what was the point of the note attached to the article accompanying the map, which mentioned that reporter Dwight Worley, who wrote the piece, "owns a Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum and has had a residence permit in New York City for that weapon since February 2011."
Bully for Dwight. But so what? Does that make him any more qualified to report the story? Nah. Go back into the J-N archives and take a look at the gun control stories I wrote. In 1988. And the last gun I fired was at the riflery range in summer camp.
Also, why is the paper not being more forceful in responding to the reaction to the pece? It has, alternately, either not commented or issued mealy-mouthed canned statements, like this one from publisher Janet Hasson:
“We knew publication of the database (as well as the accompanying article providing context) would be controversial. But we felt sharing information about gun permits in our area was important in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings.”

That's the best you can do, Janet? Given that she's never worked as a reporter., maybe it is.