I'm spoiled. No doubt about it. I've gotten used to getting so much from the web for free (or only for the price of registering and giving the captains of industry my e-mail address) that I sometimes pull up short when asked for money. But I had no problem with The New York Times's new web-business model even before reading what the ever-interesting Ta-Nehisi Coates
had to say about it. And I think the cries of outrage coming from people who want everything on the web to stay free for ever and ever, world without end, are just a little disingenuous. And disingenuous in the same way that people decry the pricing on e-books by saying "but there's no cost! It's just greed on the part of the publisher!"*
Publishing anything, even if it's small press or e-book (for fiction) or a web-service (for news), costs. Aside from the cost of building, hosting and maintaining a website--particularly a complex website, or one that sells stuff (which, I've learned working on BVC, makes all the programming and design significantly more complex), the actual creation of the work costs. In books, you're paying the writer, an editor, a copyeditor and proof-reader (and paying someone to massage the resultant text into as many e-readable formats as you can). I've said all this before. For a decent news-gathering organization you need all that--plus the ability to send people where the news is happening.
When you come down to it, the Times's model (no charge if you have a home delivery subscription, or read less than 20 articles a month; $15 a month if you subscribe web-only) is still a reasonable deal. I often take issue with the Times's slant on things, but there is no denying that they send their reporters where the news is, and that they have decades worth of credibility and clout that allow them to get in doors that Joe with a Website might not. They cover a range of topics, not just of interest to local readers, and they often take the time to go into detail and look at a story from multiple angles. I think that's worth paying for. Further, I think all the people who make it happen should be paid a living wage.
Information may want to be free, but writers of information, and the infrastructures that support them, need to be paid.
*I'm not slipping into the related discussion on control struggles between publishers and online vendors, which has been much rehearsed elsewhere.
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