Open to the World

So, like most everyone else, I’ve been thinking an awful lot about pay walls, thanks to the recent announcement that The New York Times is installing one as soon as Jan 2011. Even if you’ve never heard the term, chances are you’ve run up against a pay wall at some point, as many news-based sites have experimented with them over the years. A pay wall is a barrier that prevents your reading the entirety of an article. You’ll usually get the first few paragraphs or so for free, then just when you’re really getting interested, you’re prompted to register and pay to read the rest.

By far, the most interesting and thoughtful take on this topic I’ve read comes from Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian. He suggests that publishers deciding whether or not to institute a pay wall, and in particular a ‘universal’ pay wall (in which every article is behind the barrier, not just a ‘premium’ few) need to carefully consider the following issues:

- The first is about ‘open versus closed’. … If you universally make people pay for your content it follows that you are no longer open to the rest of the world, except at a cost. That might be the right direction in business terms, while simultaneously reducing access and influence in editorial terms. It removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.

- The second issue it raises is the one of ‘authority’ versus ‘involvement’. Or, more crudely, ‘Us versus Them’. … Here the tension is between a world in which journalists considered themselves – and were perhaps considered by others – special figures of authority. We had the information and the access; you didn’t. You trusted us filter news and information and to prioritise it – and to pass it on accurately, fairly, readably and quickly. That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority. Journalists may remain one source of authority, but people may also be less interested to receive journalism in an inert context – ie which can’t be responded to, challenged, or knitted in with other sources. It intersects with the pay question in an obvious way: does our journalism carry sufficient authority for people to pay – both online (where it competes in an open market of information) and print?

You can read the rest (for free–natch!) over here at The Guardian‘s website, and I strongly suggest that you do. It’s longish, but absolutely fascinating. If you’re short on time, watch this video interview with Rusbridger instead.

Another argument which has stuck with me since I read it, in favour of the wall, comes from Leah McLaren. Her case in point?

swag. For many years, I worked in the fashion media, an industry kept afloat on a sticky sea of complimentary champagne and freebies. Everywhere you looked offered some sort of swag, from designer goods for celebrities and VIPs to cocktail-party gift bags so laden with tat we’d “forget” them in taxis on purpose.

She later notes that she’s happier with a full bottle of her favorite, purchased shampoo than with a handful of those tiny, sample-size tubes of the really ritzy stuff. I one hundred percent get that. I don’t want some cheapo pen with some company’s name on it. I have a favorite brand of pen that I’m happy to purchase.

I understand that the argument she’s making is that offering one’s content for free cheapens its value. But swag and free content online don’t really link up this way in my mind. My anti-swag stance has zero to do with my desire to freely access and share all kinds of information—be it news, fiction, video—on the internet. My aversion to swag has to do with my aversion to clutter, and my standards for material ‘stuff.’ Unless it’s edible, if it’s free, it has to also meet my specifications for whatever it is (be it a pen, an umbrella, a t-shirt) for me to bring it home. Not bringing home random free stuff has to do with not filling up my life with things I don’t really need. I’m happy to leave that stuff for the people who love it (they do exist–I know some of them!).

So, though I don’t bring home much swag, I love to fill up my head with free content—articles I read online, mags I borrowed from a friend, books I checked out of the library for that matter. I certainly don’t expect the entire issue of a print publication to be available, and if I like what I’ve read for free well enough, chances are pretty good that I’ll pay for the exclusive stuff in the print version. (Somehow, multiple, precarious stacks of mags don’t qualify as ‘clutter’ in my house…) But I had to pay to read everything I’ve ever read, well….I’d either be broke and smart or terribly stupid.

So, I’m both anti-swag and in favour of a publication that is, as Rusbridger puts it, ‘open to the world’. To my mind, setting up a universal pay wall around your content today is the equivalent of driving a tricked-out Hummer. Venturing behind the pay wall to read The Times instead of, or as well as, The Guardian or The Globe is going to be for people who get turned on by elite status, to borrow a phrase from Up in the Air (an awesome film, btw). These are really strong value statements….not ones I’d like to make about myself, as a consumer or a publisher.