Since Ms. Balasubramanian’s piece is not very long, and to spare you the discomfort of wading through the LinkedIn bog to find it, I’ll post it here in its entirety, as it was written, save for correcting a few minor typos:
Our stories behind paywalls – the state of journalism
“My journalist friends keep publishing every other day, but then I cannot read any of them – all of them are under paywall.
I come from a legacy newspaper background, starting my career as a sub-editor over two decades back. The thought of journalism was – it will be read by policy makers, government officials, the general public, and perhaps, the story could contribute to change. All of that has changed.
In today’s scenario, when journalists talk about impact or organisations talk about impact, I am clueless as to how this is happening. Do we know that policy makers read those stories and bought those changes? How do we judge the impact of such stories, or how can such claims even be made? Do the change makers watch Instagram reels? The market is flooded with content – how are we sure what they read. It is not like those olden times where Times of India, The Hindu or the Indian Express or The Statesmen was read to know what was happening.
I am baffled by the word impact in today’s media scenario, and I find it unacceptable as journalists keep talking about their story impact. On the other side, I also hear decision makers or NGOs say, we do all the work and fight for years, and some journalist claims impact. I empathise with them.
When some young journalists write to me telling, our pitches have not been accepted – can you offer me guidance and tips? The only advice I had was, please read the articles or stories of the website where you are pitching your stories – understand what they want, and then pitch – it may work. I cannot dispense the same advice today – for them to read any publication, they have to subscribe or pay.
So how do journalists pitch the story is another ballgame altogether? And how do they get their pitches approved? It is hazy, and for now hard to solve.
And with the overflowing freelance journalists, especially in the field of environmental and climate journalism, it is not even jostling for space – there is limited space left for jostling – some of the well-known environmental media sites have shut shops.
The media website owners say they are forced to go behind paywall for revenue generation – the adverts have shrunk, and how do they monetize. I really do not understand the revenue model of today’s media, so I am not authorised to speak on this. What I understand about the paywall, that it is sheer business, and if you pay read, else you cannot.
The statement of press democracy, a change maker, or impactful stories all seems to be disappearing in thin air for now.
And people who talk about it, they may only convince themselves of it. Not the world. Not the people.”
***
Obviously, Ms. Balasubramanian was freestyling a bit with that post, and it took me some time to interpret it to my satisfaction, which was necessary because my first reading of it was triggering. What it boils down to, if I understand it correctly, is the same general complaint about the enshittification of modern media I have heard many times from within our business and from the audience, and it goes something like this: Media has lost its mission to be the objective source of truth in society, and replaced that with commercial objectives; after all, if media is obliged to operate as a business, it has no choice but to be the best business it can be, with all that implies about choices and compromises it has to make.
As a consequence, the change in priorities has degraded the quality of the product itself; because media is now profit-oriented, and the currency by which we ultimately measure success is eyeballs, then “impact” – and therefore validity and credibility – is simply a function of how big the audience for a particular piece of output is, whether or not it’s gone “viral,” which is a term that makes me gag even if I don’t say it out loud, and not whether the story had any real-world effect.
And of course, Exhibit A in this indictment of the media is the contemptible paywall, the most visible example of prioritizing production of revenue-generating content over providing information.
Reality bites
The Manila Times implemented a partial paywall about two years ago, and there was a great deal of uncertainty about whether or not it was the right thing to do; the plan encountered significant resistance from many of our associates, particularly among the opinion writers, who feared it would drive away their audiences. At present, we have a paywall for our opinion section and some of the special sections of the paper for the online edition, but the daily news in the main sections (National, Regional, World, Business, and Sports) is free. We have a digital edition which is a virtual print edition, that of course is by subscription only; and we still print a substantial number of hard copies every day – I’m not sure of the exact number, it’s in the neighborhood of 400,000. Our daily reach, according to our consultants, is about 2 million.
The hard reality is that it costs money to produce the news, and it costs more money to produce a better and more diverse product (such as the multimedia streaming channel we launched a few months ago). There are supplies to buy and bills to pay, and above all, talent costs money. Whatever else journalism is to those of us who engage in it, it is above all a job, because we all like to do things such as live in a building and eat food.
There was a time when advertising and subscriptions to the print edition were sufficient to fund the entire operation, and provide all of our content for free online. But print is dying, so that doesn’t work anymore. We could provide all of our daily content for free online, but in order to support ourselves it would require an unreasonable amount of advertising, which no one likes; we are already at the limit of what is tolerable on the free parts of our website, and there are some papers in town who have more limited or no paywalls whose websites are practically unreadable due to so many advertisements. Take a peek at the Inquirer for an example of that.
And on top of these constraints, our competition has increased enormously; not only are we competing with the other legacy media in town, we are competing with thousands upon thousands of self-appointed social media journalists. Some of them are actually good at it. So, we need to keep up our quality and what competitive advantages we can hold onto, which are in the form of experience, and greater resources and scale. And guess what? That costs money, too.
Unfortunately, the only way we have to measure whether we are spending our money appropriately is by the size of our audience, the so-called “impact” that Ms. Balasubramanian scoffs at, because real impact – catalyzing some change in society or government – is not something that happens every day. It does happen, but it takes a ton of ore to produce a gram of gold.
I do understand Ms. Balasubramanian’s frustration, from the standpoint that we, as paying customers, have a reasonable expectation of receiving value for our subscription money. Too many news outlets, whether of the traditional or social variety, do not adequately provide that, and that is wrong. We, as media practitioners, should embrace the pay-to-read model as a compulsion to constantly improve the quality of what we do. I certainly try to look at it that way, and treat every day as training for better research skills, better critical thinking skills, and better writing skills, with the end view of making my stories the best anyone can read on any given topic. I’ve been doing it with The Manila Times for a dozen years, and if I do it for 100 more, I will still fall very, very far short of perfection.
But not far enough that I’m apprehensive about asking someone to pay for it; and as my craft improves, I’ll just ask you to pay more. It’s my job, after all.
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