Walls

Earlier this month, when Edward Delgado—an Anchorage man who says faith in God helped convert him from gay to straight—gave a series of talks at University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner had a reporter cover the ensuing controversy.

Within moments after the piece was posted, there was a comment, from someone with the handle “mamabear,” ripping one of the sources the story quoted: “Jessica Angelette has to grow a spine,” mamabear’s 200-plus-word comment began. “I'm about as pro-gay rights as you can get. But this young woman's remarks are ridiculous.”

That was a week ago. At the time of this writing, on Wednesday, there are 371 more comments, the latest from just this morning. The comments range from terse quips to several-hundred-word mini-treatises on finer points of theology. They formed, as good comments sections do, something of a public square which residents of Interior Alaska could vent to, and at, each other.

Not many News-Miner stories get 372 comments, but almost all of them get at least a few and many play host to some lively discussions.

It’s hard to imagine those discussions remaining as robust as they are now when the News-Miner begins charging readers for some or all of its online stories.

Word of this move trickled out earlier this week, after Managing Editor Rod Boyce told students in a few UAF journalism classes.

Tom Hewitt, a journalism student who edits The Sun Star, UAF’s weekly student newspaper, was in one of those classes.

He’d asked Boyce a question about how the paper’s online presence had affected its print distribution, but wasn’t really expecting to hear that the News-Miner was erecting a pay wall around its online version.

“I was shocked, I have to say,” Hewitt says. “It definitely runs counter to the direction the industry is going.”

Hewitt, like me, has grown up in a world where consuming news—or almost any other kind of “content”—on the internet is the norm.

“I don’t subscribe to the News-Miner,” he says. “I just read it online.”

Readers like Hewitt (or me, for that matter) pose a particular problem for papers like the News-Miner, and it’s not the 75 cents that they’re losing from the price of a newsstand sale (it varies a bit from paper to paper, but those prices rarely cover much more than the costs of printing that copy and delivering it to that newsstand). No, the problem is that papers sell ads against the size of their circulation, and more readers on the web generally means fewer readers of the print edition. That wouldn’t be a problem if new revenue from ads on the internet made up for the lost revenue of ads printed on the dead tree version. But so far, papers everywhere haven’t seen that happen. The result is that the cost of producing journalism for a growing online audience is subsidized by a shrinking set of print readers. Simple math tells us that’s not a sustainable arrangement. But what to do about it?

Boyce isn’t the first to entertain the model of charging readers to see an online version of the paper. In fact, newspapers around the nation are in the midst of a debate about whether that’s a good idea or not. For proponents of the idea, charging to read news stories online is a gesture that affirms their value. Consider the following from a memo by MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton:

“First, we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free. Not only does this erode our print circulation, it devalues the core of our business—the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily basis.” (The News-Miner is owned by a Singleton family trust, but not part of MediaNews. In any case, those present in the UAF classes where he announced the move agreed that Boyce said the idea originated locally; Boyce himself wasn’t willing to talk on the record about the decision, saying it would be premature to do so.)

Proponents sometimes draw a comparison to iTunes, which successfully merged the on-demand downloading model from earlier free file-sharing services like Napster to a profitable business model that also protected the copyrights of artists.

But it’s not clear that the music industry makes for a good parallel in this case. Music listeners are paying for an experience, one that they want to be able to have some control over—the ability to listen when you want, to listen many times over.

Journalism is an experience too, but with the possible exception of long, narrative pieces—writing that has more in common with books than it does with the inverted pyramid—it’s not an experience we’re generally interesting in repeating. We want facts, and we want context, maybe a little analysis or opinion. But we don’t want to read individual articles more than once.

Further, erecting a pay wall around online content destroys the digital equivalent of what used to be called the pass-along factor. Newspapers get passed along; they’re left in a breakroom or on the table at a coffee shop. They’re available in the library. Articles get clipped out, or at least shown to friends. Readership surveys let papers figure out roughly how many more reader they have than subscribers.

Online, something similar happens with email and blog posts and Facebook links. Which means that while a pay wall will get some people—real news junkies or folks whose business depends on being well-informed about a particular community—to pay for admission, it’ll simply keep a lot of other, more casual readers out.

I worry about this for two reasons. The first is that Alaska is a big state with a small press corps, and we already have too few journalists chasing too many stories. If the News-Miner sends a reporter to Juneau again for this upcoming legislative session, the work they produce will be valuable for every Alaskan. If its hidden behind a pay wall—especially one that requires you to pay for everything or get nothing—it’ll reach a much smaller audience, and a diminished reach for statewide reporting is in no one’s best interest.

I worry too about what the loss of those casual readers might mean for Alaska’s second largest city. That virtual public square that now exists in the comments section may go away, or it may find a home elsewhere. But if each participant doesn’t share the News-Miner’s professional reporting as a starting place, it’s tough to imagine what common ground they will share.

“I don’t know what I would do,” if put in Boyce’s shoes, says Hewitt. “It’s tough to criticize him super harshly; he’s responding to an existential threat to his business.” I agree. Journalism faces so many uncertainties that it’s tough to know how any experiment will work out (see Brendan Joel Kelley’s cover story to read about another one). But we can all hope that at least some of these tough calls work out, and that the cure won’t prove to be worse than the malady.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com