By Tracy Dingmann
One of the most frequent complaints I hear about the Journal doesn’t concern the paper’s content at all.
It’s about the paper’s pay wall – or the insistence that online readers who don’t subscribe to the print edition must pay a subscription fee for unfettered access to online content.
When the Journal installed its pay wall in 2001, it was one of only a few newspapers to do so.
At the time, many in the faltering newspaper business thought paid online sites just might be the future of the industry. After all, there had to be some way to harness the financial power of all those eyeballs going online for news and entertainment. Lock it down and make them pay!
So the Journal installed its pay wall in 2001 and never looked back. But even in the little blurb on the Journal’s site that explains “Why We Charge,” Journal publisher T.H. Lang seems hopeful that readers will eventually come back to the good old newsprint version with its expensive department store display ads and handy cable TV listings and hard-to-read classifieds.
“By making our Web site for members only, ABQjournal.com hopes to strengthen its bond to the printed newspaper and to deliver electronically the most comprehensive and best edited news reports from around the state,” Lang wrote.
Well, turns out that didn’t happen. And it’s never going to happen.
Online information wants to be free and linkable and widely accessible, and people who surf the web (and read the ads and buy things and return again and again to your site) get very annoyed when they hit pay walls during their travels.
On the Journal site, non-subscribers can read one Journal story, but only if they agree to watch an online ad. If they want to read another Journal story, they have to watch another ad. Or they can browse the whole site for a day, but only after they watch an ad. And they can only do that twice a week.
Those kind of restrictions make people very, very angry.
It’s one thing for Albuquerque readers, who live here and can maybe scrounge up a copy of the paper from that day or haul their ass out to the Albuquerque Publishing Company library for older issues.
But what about people who don’t live in Albuquerque who want to read New Mexico news from the state’s largest paper? Or distant researchers or students or journalists or casual searchers who want access to certain stories only the Albuquerque Journal has written about?
Focusing on the hometown reader/subscriber is a nice thought, but it is a strategy that’s embarrassingly quaint – and infuriating – for the times.
Ultimately, I think the real victim in all this is the Journal. When a newspaper hides its stories behind a pay wall, it stops Google searches in their tracks and removes itself from the global information game. Pay walls don’t just engender ill will among would-be readers, they go against the very heart of the way information flows today.
I thought about this recently when I came across an article on the journalism review site Poynter.org that examines just how newspaper pay sites are doing. The article, originally posted on paidcontent.org, looks at several pay sites, including the Journal, and evaluates their experiences.
This piece certainly serves up some interesting data about our notoriously secretive hometown paper, doesn’t it!
But for me, perhaps the most telling piece of information was a quote from assistant managing editor Donn Friedman, who defends the Journal’s pay wall with this bottom line:
“We are still committed to the print retention model and the idea that our content has value.”
Looks like that pay wall is not going anywhere, folks.
Stay tuned for a post tomorrow about how the Journal website readership compares to other local sites!
abqjournalwatch.wordpress.com 
Thank you!!! The Journal… always so behind on the times. It’s called progress, get on the bus!
Thanks for the comment, Dorigen!
I’d love to know the average age of the Journal subscribers. I suspect the paywall has resulted in the Journal being largely irrelevant for the next generation. It’s like a film manufacturer deciding to no avail to ignore digital cameras. It’s a tough world, and the old school will change or die.
What’s sad about the Journal’s attitude is that by turning a deaf ear to the e-literate community, great writers, like Tracy Dingmann and Dan Mayfield, are only noticed when the web community is alerted. I only knew of this article because it was linked this morning at dukecityfix.com
My dad worked at the Journal for twenty years, and I worked a paper route here as a kid. I have a lot of nostalgia regarding the Journal, however I believe the current management letting it slowly fade away.
Thanks for the comment, and thanks for checking out the site, kellivickers. You make some great points! One thing, though – I used to write for the Journal, but I don’t anymore, and ABQJournalWatch.com is not a Journal product.
“…certain stories only the Albuquerque Journal has written about…”
Fortunately for the Journal, this is a vanishing species of story.
Kelly,
Approximately 70% of the daily Journal print readers are 45 and older, and 30% are ages 18 to 44. See here: http://www.abqpubco.com/pdfs/2009/JournalReaders.pdf
The online numbers split slightly more evenly: 57% of the .com readers are ages 45 and older, 43% are 45 and older. See here: http://www.abqpubco.com/pdfs/2009/ABQJOURNAL.COM.pdf
There are a lot of economics involved in the management’s decisions. Let me preface: I am not privy to *any* “insider” information, but consider the following:
The average DAILY circulation for one single print edition is over 200,000 people, whereas it takes the Journal’s website to reach approximately that many visitors an entire MONTH. Advertising rates are usually charged in terms of how many people an advertiser can reach. So, the Journal is able to charge much more for a print advertisement.
Now, for a company that has a ton of overhead as far as keeping a newsroom staff, management, in addition to the costs of publishing a print edition everyday, not to mention the licensing fees for all the reprinted AP stories, it makes a lot of business sense to protect your print, and add incremental revenue to that by using a pay wall on the website.
So, it’s difficult; the younger generation, especially the one that visits the great site Duke City Fix, is left out on local news by actual reporters (I love blogs, but sometimes I’d rather have a report by someone with press credentials).
But, until the daily online readership can get anywhere near the print readership, it’s basically a moot point. Which is quite the conundrum, because I would argue the pay wall hinders online growth (see here http://siteanalytics.compete.com/abqjournal.com/).
Thoughts?
And I agree with Keith; even before I left Abq three years ago, I was tired of having to dig through all the re-printed AP stories to find actual Journal staff writers.
The pay wall irritates me because the Journal’s website is so bad. I’ve seen MySpace pages done by 12-year-olds that are more attractive and easier to navigate. I would be willing to pay, but not as much as they’re charging for a site that looks like something from GeoCities circa 1998 and has about the same functionality.
Murdoch is apparently planning on hiding his papers from the Google too.
http://mashable.com/2009/11/09/rupert-murdoch-google/
Hey Sophie –
Wow, why on Earth would Rupert Murdoch do that?
BTW, when I wrote that the Journal’s pay wall stops Google searches in their tracks, I didn’t mean it as literally as what Murdoch apparently intends to do. I just meant that people who use Google searches to find information can’t click through and read any results that Google pulls up from the Journal site.
Tracy
The data company Hitwise just reported that Google & Google News may (possibly) account for 25% of the Wall Street Journal’s traffic:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2009/11/newscorp_googleless.html
Disclosure: I don’t speak for my employer, and am not privy to any of my employer’s internal financial data. That said, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years studying the economics of the newspaper business, because my livelihood depends on it.
I think the discussion above misunderstands the underlying economics that are driving the news business today.
The San Francisco Chronicle has a free web site and, by measure of audience size, a fabulously successful one. The Chron is going down the tubes. Why is this? Because the revenue model simply has not followed readers onto the Web. So when great newspapers (or formerly great ones) like the Chron give their product away for free on the web, it only takes a small loss of readership of the print product, people who drop their paper subscription because they can get it free on the web, to wipe out any profit on the web. The Chron’s just one of many case studies I could offer. Closer to home, the Albuquerque Tribune had good content, a terrific free web site. Ditto the Rocky Mountain News. The Seattle PI. You know how those turned out.
There’s strong evidence to support this argument in the fact that no one has been able to establish a web-only, ad revenue supported local or regional web site able to support a newsroom even a fraction of the size of the print newsrooms in their circulation area. Lots of good journalism out there on the web and the local and regional level, but far smaller in terms of the number of bodies gathering and distributing information that provided in traditional newsrooms.
The web’s a great way to easily distribute information to diverse audiences. As a writer, I’d much prefer the Journal’s web site to be free, because it would extend the reach of my work. But the money just isn’t there.
But it’s also worth noting that no news web site at the local or regional level can come close to the traffic my work on climate change and the like gets with the print product. On the web, my climate stories are most likely to be read by the self-selected audience that’s already interested in climate change. The general-audience bundled nature of the print product, on the other hand, allows me to reach people who stumble on my story while thumbing through the front section of the paper, but who would otherwise not self-select a climate story.
So if a paywall is what is needed for, in Donn’s words, “print retention,” I guess I’ve gotta grudgingly support it.
P.S. Thanks for the kind words elsewhere, Tracy.
I agree with John Fleck.
People need to get past the idea that journalism should be free. It takes money and time; why should you not have to pay something for the final product? And in this day and age, younger people are likely to not pay for the hard copy and just get it online. How are news agencies supposed to survive? The online ad models just don’t produce enough money.
We can glorify grass-root blogger news all we want, but how much can we expect from people who aren’t getting paid? There’s only so much you can do with no funds. You can’t get coverage of war zones, for instance. Sending people to dangerous areas and providing food, protection, etc. requires corporations with income. And income doesn’t come from giving away your product for free.