Paying for online news
From the start, online news meant to be complementary to newspapers
My pal Mike Sielski had a Twitter exchange with several of his followers on Monday morning about his most recent column in the Philadelphia Inqurirer.
It wasn’t the Mike’s opinion that had his followers fired up.
It was the availability of said opinion piece.
This is part of a much longer conversation about digital journalism economics and the state of online journalism. I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of the online journalism space in 2023, and specifically how The Future of Journalism as a concept has been described in scholarly and popular sources. I’ve been inspired by the work Dave Karpf is doing on his excellent newsletter, looking at how Wired Magazine has covered each iteration of online life.
Mike’s Monday morning Twitter exchange got me thinking about the history and development of charging for online news and one point got stuck in my head.
The root question, of course, is the so-called Original Sin of Online Journalism — that newspapers gave away their content for free in the early days of the internet, and that if they hadn’t done that, the newspaper industry would be different.
That’s a much bigger topic for a much longer newsletter. But one point popped into my head.
Online news was never meant to be the primary form of news. I was there, as not only a news reporter/sports reporter/columnist at The Times Herald in Olean, N.Y. but also as the paper’s “online editor.”
Back in the early days of journalism on the web — from, say, 1996 to 2004 (those are rough dates, not to be taken literally) — the newspaper’s print edition was THE focus. It was how newspapers made their money, it was the source of their legitimacy.
The online version? That was a bonus. An add on. Something extra. Maybe a way to connect with people who had moved away, or a way for your paper to look and feel cutting edge. But as a money maker? As the primary focus of your work and your business? No way.
A newspaper’s website was designed to be complementary to the print edition.
And that first early decade set the tone for newspapers and their readers. Twenty years and several iterations of the web later, that tone still informs so much of how we collectively approach online news.