Fair and Balanced?

I was online reading news stories this week, and I came across a gleeful piece about how Newsday, the Long Island daily paper, made a huge mistake in making its web side a pay service. The authors were obviously appalled that anyone would be trying to charge for web content – even as little as $5 per week – and were crowing that after three months, only 35 people had signed up for the pay service. The authors also mentioned the $4 million that Newsday spent redesigning their website, and calculated that the paper has grossed $9,000 – suggesting that the remaining $3,991,000 was a waste of money, and that the site’s readership has dropped from millions of people each month to just 35. If you didn’t already assume a healthy skepticism about anything you read on line, let me suggest that this article would be a good place to start…

If you actually read down through the rest of the story, which you can find in the New York Observer online site, you will find out that the drop in traffic to the Newsday site is significant – it goes from 2.2 million unique visits in October to 1.5 million in December – but hardly the disaster the headline would imply. You will also note that the site is available free of charge to anyone who already has a subscription to the paper or subscribes to Optimum Cable, one of the local cable providers (which happens to be owned by the same people who own the newspaper). Together, that’s believed to be something along the lines of 75% of the population of Long Island. We might also wonder if the drop is actually going to affect the long-term performance of the paper, since it has only been three months since it became a pay service…

Now, no one is claiming that charging money for content on the Internet is an especially successful business strategy; most of the companies that have tried it so far have met with marginal results at best. It’s especially problematic in the news business, since there are still a large number of free news services available online, and all of them will carry the same news stories – sometimes literally, as in the case of stories purchased from the AP, UPI, Reuter’s and other wire services. And it probably is true that if the traffic flow to the Newsday site continues to drop the owners will find it increasingly difficult to sell advertising space on the page. I’m even willing to concede that life has become hellish for the local reporting staff working for Newsday, and that they are desperately unhappy with the current configuration of their employer (to the point of resurrecting the nickname “Hellville” for Long Island). The headline is still deceptive…

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it hardly matters if someone who runs a free-content website is complaining about pay-for-access sites; even assuming that they’re not jealous of the $9,000 in subscription money (that’s the equivalent of a LOT of paid Internet advertising, folks), they’re still right that charging for content is both obnoxious and silly – especially given the availability of alternate websites. I just can’t help thinking that if we’re going to hold up unpaid web producers (and bloggers) as some pure and unbiased reporting source, then we have the same responsibility for telling the truth and checking the facts as any other news source – and we deserve the same mockery and contempt when we slant the news to suit our own particular biases…

Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong…