Not Quite the Year of the Great Paywall

For all the claims that paywalls started to pay off for newspapers in 2011, there's less to the success stories than meets the eye

By Bobbie Johnson

The media is stuffed with pundits proclaiming that 2011 was the year of something or other. For the most part, it’s easy to ignore these trend pieces. Many are simply chum thrown in the water to attract readers over a quiet period, while giving journalists a chance to take a breather.

Still, a few claims caught my eye. One was Mashable’s assertion that 2011 was “the year the paywall worked.” In particular, it argued that the New York Times and Minneapolis Star-Tribune had set a path for others to follow by making money out of paywalled stories. Said Mashable: “News organizations stopped using ‘our content is worth paying for’ as a sole rationale and began strategically providing value for their online content. While the the New York Times‘s strategy was much-criticized when it launched in March, it has since turned a profit. The Minneapolis Star Tribune made an estimated $800,000 in digital circulation revenue during its first month of having a paywall, despite a 10-15% decline in web traffic.”

The numbers may be right, but the sentiment—that these examples prove paywalls work—doesn’t ring true to me. There has been a lot written about paywalls over the past year or two. Our own Mathew Ingram has been covering a lot of ground on the topic over the past few months. (Here’s another of his pieces.) As far as I can see, the jury is still out on the issue.

It’s not that paywalls can’t work—there are countless examples of success over the years. Still, we should be very careful that when they succeed, people take away the right lessons. So I thought I would highlight one small story from a few days ago that may be useful.

How a Paywall Can Kill Your Scoop

A few days ago, I followed up on a story about British Prime Minister David Cameron getting a custom-made iPad app to monitor real-time stats and news from around the U.K. The original story was broken by the Times of London, which famously went behind a paywall in 2010. Since reaction to the story was skeptical, I rang my sources in Westminster and confirmed that work on the app had been under way for a few months. That was that.

Then, as I watched the story continue to spread, I noticed a few things.

First of all, most follow-up reports didn’t give credit for the original story to the Times. Many nodded to a different British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, which had basically lifted the story from its rival and republished it.

In a world whose media often accuse news of “over-aggregating,” the Telegraph (first published in 1855) has issues: Over the past few years a large number of individual reporters and news organizations have complained to me—sometimes officially—that Britain’s biggest-selling “serious” daily paper has systematically appropriated their work online and not given credit.

It’s unethical. It’s a fact of life. Fortunately, there are still ways to get the right credit out there.

Credit the Paywall for the Loss?

On Twitter, the Times reporter who broke the story, @SamCoatesTimes, tweeted it once and got a little traction. As more active users pushed the Telegraph version and others, the credit went elsewhere as versions of the story spread.

The Times was hit by a triple whammy. Because the original story was hidden behind a solid paywall, most people who heard about it or were writing tertiary reports couldn’t access it. And because the Telegraph chose to minimize credit for the story it had lifted, it was able to fool readers into thinking it had originated the story. The Times wasn’t out in public, owning the story, so it lost at every step.