Today, the Ventura County Star announced that it is going digital subscription only – limited articles will be available for limited times. In doing so, it joined the LA Times, Orange County Register, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Boston Herald, the Nashville Tennessean, and numerous others in erecting a pay wall.
This is a trend I emphatically do not like. One of the strengths of the Internet is being able to get news from a variety of sources; to read what is happening in local communities; to discover the human side across the world. Paywalls prevent that from happening.
Sure, one could subscribe to each paper individually. That would be very expensive (which is why I only subscribe to the Los Angeles Times). I would be very happy if someone created a business opportunity out of this that allowed one to subscribe to a selected set of paywall papers — 5, 10, 15, all — for a reasonable fixed fee per month. But having to subscribe to each paper individually for a digital product is prohibitive.
I know I have some tough decisions in the days ahead. Our local newspaper in SE Virginia announced in the last week that it will start a paywall this summer.
I’m not sure how I will respond (partly because they haven’t announced details or pricing yet). My first inclination is to subscribe in some form, but I know we’ve had bad luck at starting and stopping subscriptions with them in the past.
But I also have in the back of my mind that, for what I tend to read from them, maybe I should just rely on the local TV sites…and choose another paper to digitally subscribe to…either for news from back home in Canada or for a “better” paper for national and world news coverage.
I just find that too many news sites charge more on the digital side than seems warranted (since they don’t have to ship physical copies and pay people to deliver them door-to-door).