Why David Simon is wrong about paywalls

Let me count the ways. Ten, in fact.

David Simon is a talented writer and storyteller, but is he qualified to give advice to publishers about how to save their dying industry?

As qualified as anybody else, I suppose. But when he suggested in a recent piece for CJR that people like me who disagree with his position on paid content were unqualified, that got under my skin a bit. Simon wrote, These folks (paywall opponents) dont understand the first thing about actual journalism. He also lumped us in with an imaginary crowd of people who supposedly think amateurs can replace professionals, though we take no such position.

To Simons credit, he engaged readers in comments on his CJR piece, but the conversation turned more into a quibble over the definition of ad hominem than a dialogue about the important issues facing newspapers.

I decided to step back and lay out my thoughts in a more organized fashion. First, Simon and I agree: that journalism is important. That newspapers giving their content away for free online is a bad idea. That investigative/enterprise journalism is expensive. That the beat system plays an important role in watchdog journalism, and beat journalism requires paid professionals who are in it for the long haul.

That said, there are at least 10 arguments against paywalls.

1. The New York Times is a poor model on which to judge the success of paid content.

The Times is unique. It isnt a local paper. Even the New York news covered by the Times has more national gravitas than local flavor. The Times has a global audience, and as a truly outstanding journalistic institution it has some key advantages: Namely, it comes closer than most other outlets to producing journalism on a consistent basis that people will actually pay for; and it produces journalism that people all over the world will consistently link to. These are powerful forces for creating the kind of added value that might lead to paid subscriptions.

The Times takes advantage of these assets by keeping its paywall porous. Not only is it easily defeated, the Times rewards people who follow links from other sources by not counting those articles against the monthly quota (see comment #45 by Greg in the CJR conversation with Simon).

While Simon, near the end of the thread, notes some high-minded predictions about the potential growth of the Times paywall, he has not provided evidence that it will ever do what he claims a paywall can do: Support, on its own, New York Times journalism. By this standard, which Simon created himself, the Times paywall is an abject failure.

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Why David Simon is wrong about paywalls