IF NEWS DIES, WE KILLED IT

Today, I did something seemingly crazy for someone my age. (Or so I’m told.) I became a digital subscriber to the New York Times. You heard. I actually got out my plastic, punched numbers into the relevant little boxes, and signed on to fork out NZD$17 per month for unlimited access to the Grey Lady. Sick of constantly reaching my monthly ‘20 free articles’ quota, I vowed to scale the online paywall, spurred by the thought of the plethora of articles from that great bastion of world journalism since 1851 awaiting me on the other side.

“Why, Jaimee? Why would you do that? Why would you PAY for what the internet lets you have for free? Why wouldn’t you just avail yourself of the smorgasbord of free-ness that is The Huffington Post or The Guardian instead?? They reference NYT articles half the time anyway!”

You raise an excellent point, oh spoilt brat of the digital era Cynical-Twenty-Something. But you see, we’ve been duped. This whole pattern of online media consumption is utterly unsustainable. Raised in the felicitous yet highly temporal era of Free Internet, the world is now cottoning on to the idea that newspapers, magazines, books, and generally anything else worth its weight in printy goodness is dying a slow but inevitable death. We have no idea how to pay for credible journalism anymore, if print is dead and online is free. Advertising sales on news sites have bandaged the wound to an extent for the past 15 years, but there’s still blood spurting out everywhere you look. I lament the day the headlines bloggers announce: “New York Times files for bankruptcy after the digital onslaught cuts all remaining revenue streams.” And I’ll be damned if I’m going to passively continue to contribute to the death of paid-for, reputable media. I don’t want bloggers telling me their skewed opinion on world events; I want accountability, dammit, and if there’s no editor, no fact-checker, and no research, just hot air blowing all over the place and us all capitalising on a free balloon ride, we’ve none to blame but ourselves if ‘truth’ soon becomes an even more relative concept than it currently is. It’s hard enough in this age to filter reporting on world events past the bias of its source and try to make rational sense of things, let alone a future without the comfort of the knowledge that at least the writers are, um, educated. And the reality is, as fun as the prospect is of a world allowing anyone with an internet connection and a penchant for HTML to masquerade as a ‘journalist’; the fact remains that when it all hits the fan in Libya, someone’s still gotta pay to go over there and report from the ground. And you don’t catch most bloggers doing that. Hard facts require investment. Up until now, this investment has been made by media companies. Media companies that send trained people in to cover major events, who are then paid to filter these events via their own informed biases to make sense of them for the rest of us. The rest of us who have historically then paid them $3 for their trouble. I’m not naïve to the fact that media editors and writers all have strong biases in the current model. I’m not saying the NYT is infallible either. I am saying, however, that we’re throwing not just the baby but the entire kindergarten out with the bath water if we think that every time we avoid paying for our news we aren’t bringing the world closer to anarchy.

I decided today to put my money where my mouth is. You pay for what you care about. Be that music (bless your soul, those still saving the industry one CD at a time), parent-less nine year olds in feudal Rwanda who haven’t eaten a nourishing meal since February, and who spend hours a day toiling for 40 cents with which to feed their five younger siblings, (World Vision, you are phenomenal) or newspapers, because you acknowledge that access to responsible news about the release of Apple's next product issues like those is more important than ever – you invest.
And so, I did.

And, just quietly? As a newly-minted subscriber, I can attest that by the bye the NYT’s style pages are also excellent.

And that’s for free.