News, as we all know, is governed by the Ws: Who, what, where, when and why. When you are writing up a factual, detailed account of an event, who matters every bit as much as what and the rest of it. The identity of a person who makes a statement is newsworthy and relevant. Without this fact, we are deprived of a key metric for determining credibility: identity. If a PR person says something at company “A” that turns out to have been a knowing lie, then we should be very skeptical of everything she says for companies B, C and on, throughout her employment history, unto Z.

Paywalls restrict the flow of content, and that’s bad

I was a business columnist when the wall went up, and afterwards I started noticing that the number of visitors to my column had fallen dramatically. In fact, on average it looked like I was getting about 90 percent fewer readers than I had been before — almost exactly the same dropoff that the Times of London would see years later, when News Corp. instituted a paywall there. And as much as I wanted the Globe to make money so that it could continue to pay my salary, I didn’t like that at all. (…)

Paywalls are backward-looking, not forward-looking

The second reason I don’t like paywalls is that I think they are a step backward rather than a step forward — a “line of sandbags,” so to speak. Whether or not the newspapers that implement them are willing to admit it, one of the primary features of a paywall is that it keeps people in, not out. In other words, it makes it less likely that they will quit the paper and go digital completely, and thereby protects the printed newspaper. (…)

Newspapers need to adapt, not retrench

The third reason I don’t like paywalls is that I don’t think they are going to work — and by “work,” I mean solve the problems that most newspapers are facing. Everyone seems to have decided the New York Times paywall is a success because it has about 400,000 subscribers and it is bringing in an estimated $35 million in revenue. But that is still a drop in the bucket: according to the paper’s recent results, one of the world’s most successful paywalls is not even making up for the continuing decline in print ad revenue.

[dica de The Guardian]

[dica de @pjeronimo]