The New Reading Environment

After a long and glorious spell of underpolicing, the modern paywall has attained its final, fortress-defending form. For years the illicit pleasure of an incognito tab often exceeded the actual reading experience. Today’s paywalls, however, are hostile and impenetrable. Might they be sentient too? Every week new websites and browser extensions emerge to tunnel through or scramble over the walls, and every week they are crushed by rocks and catapults. (...)

In the good old porous days, paywalls had the quality of a suggestion. Now they are binding contracts with strong personalities. The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, which log readers out much more reliably than they keep them logged in, are aggressive bouncers averse to bribes and persuasion. Contra its gloomy disposition and intense commitment to Courier, which give it the appearance of a bomb threat, Leon Wieseltier’s Liberties is more like a generous (if creepy) uncle, offering two free articles in exchange for an email address. (...)

Paywalls, of course, keep publications in business, even if an online subscription can never replicate the pleasures of print. But even the most passionate faith in the system’s logic is liable to be shaken by regular encounters with the draconian paywalls of local news sites. An attempt to read even a single article in the Houston Chronicle or the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or any number of other newspapers slams the reader against an unforgiving prompt for a one-time micropayment followed by a weekly rate somewhere down the line. Pay nothing, read nothing — beyond a lede or a dateline. On their own, these fees are small and even reasonable. Still, the situation is clearly counterproductive: Who is going to subscribe when it’s impossible to know exactly what one is subscribing to? There are stories in these papers about the depravities of local cops, state legislatures, and transnational landlords that could provide an essential service, and nothing quite literalizes the tragedy of local news like the obvious fact that, in the face of such discouragement, the vast majority of people simply won’t read their local reporting at all.

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For the most part, nonprofit journalism—once a novel phenomenon, now a critical node in the news infrastructure—has avoided the paywall trap. National institutions like ProPublica and the Marshall Project, and local ventures like New York Focus and the Texas Tribune, publish essential investigative reporting and make it widely available to readers. The American Prospect’s editor David Dayen, who has been explicit in his antipathy for the paywall model, wrote last year that “the greatest threat to democracy as it relates to the media is not the spread of disinformation, but the spread of paywalls. The information that an informed citizenry needs to make choices about who governs them and what is happening underneath the surface has been privatized, gated, and kept from those with an inability to pay.

The New New Reading Environment (The Editors, N+1) Read more:

Image: Paul Chan, die Galerie. 2020