Micropatronage and the virtuous paywall
I remember, back in 2008, stepping out of Oxford Circus station and seeing that the Evening Standard news-stand had been updated. A sort of proto-Blade Runner makeover, sandwich boards replaced by updating monitor screens, electronic card payment. It struck me as a moment of overlap, newsprint and ubiquitous infotech, like that point in time that Orville Wright and Neil Armstrong could have met. Within a month the paper been sold on to a Russian oligarch.
I’ve gone from someone who used to buy at least one newspaper a day (often two) as a teenager, to someone who has only bought a single physical newspaper so far this year. So I’m following the stories about the impending newspocalyse with interest and some little sense of guilt.
It’s been a long drawn-out separation. Last couple of years I’d buy The Guardian on a Saturday purely because I liked the physical form factor of the weekly listings guide – these days ‘there’s an app for that’. (Not that I really watch TV anymore – around four hours so far this year, all on my laptop.) The only physical paper I’ve paid for was a copy of the Guardian International edition I picked up at Gare du Nord before hopping on a Eurostar. Because I’m Jason Bourne, obviously.
I don’t even have enough loyalty to visit news site home pages, like most of the news beach-combers I just read that which washes up in my friend’s feeds and searches. Naturally the “paywall” concept, the last desperate gasp of “old” news, seems antithetical to how I and my friends are exposed to news articles. Single source; no sharing? Do remember to label your former customers as thieves when that plan backfires…
And yet, if only because that’s the prevailing net-head axiom, indeed
echoed by the Guardian’s editor, that my contrarian mind awakes. What if there was a paywall scheme for news that was compatible with the customs and values of the current network-news consumer? A “digg this up” for the news?
Let us imagine some fictional Fleet Street ox, say The Daily Brute, sells their online access for cash. Credit-cards, paypal, anonymous code scratchcards bought for spare change at whatever remains of newsagents, whatever. Load up your credits and you can read whatever you like.
But the twist is, it’s not a walled garden, you’re participating in a variation of a threshold pledge system based around granting free access to others.
The very first person to access an article has to pay. But once they’ve done so the article is free to access for the next few people to attempt to read it. Once those “free riders” (although one assumes third-party advertising will still feature) read the article, and assuming they’ve got credit, they have the option of “passing it on”, gifting access, to the next few people attempting to access it. Then once a pre-advertised threshold of payments has been made on an article it becomes permanently “unlocked” (and perhaps ad supported), safe to cite and link to, and (to ensure some semblance of permanence) accessible by the archive spiders and the like under an irrevocable (but not exclusive) license.
In those circumstances the cultural instincts of the web generation, the link sharing and micro-blogging, take on additional meaning. To those behind the news curve, only viewing the highly trafficked links, it might seem like web business-as-usual. And the infofreakos, sitting at the intersection between hard-core news consumers and respected linkers become the king makers. If enough people pay for this thing of value now, that value can be freely shared in perpetuity.
And since there’s potentially a financial transaction involved (for the reader or their friends, or those trusting a linker’s reputation) it might, I’d hope, help correct one of the plagues of the current web newsphere – and financially vote-down the link-bait trolls.
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