[WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model

[Ray Saintonge]

Gwern Branwen wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 6:40 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:
>> More broadly, there's a good side and a bad side to this. The bad
>> side, yes, a lot of our existing references will break, and it'll be a
>> bit harder to write good, robustly cited, articles in the future. On
>> the plus side, it might help wean us off an over-reliance on news
>> stories and (often slapdash) journalism as our preferred sources, and
>> that's got to be beneficial.
> What worries me on the topic is that as newspapers shift to online 
> content - content which is *not* mirrored in the dead-tree version 
> (this is increasingly common eg. I read that the Wall Street Journal 
> does this now) - their pages become less and less reliably accessible.
> For example, it wasn't that long ago that the NYT merged with another 
> paper and broke all the links, and those missing articles (referenced 
> by Wikipedia articles) couldn't be refound in the NYT website. If the 
> original paper's domain blocked WebCitation and Internet Archive with 
> robots.txt (as is very likely), then any of those articles which were 
> online only are basically *gone*.
>
> The set of newspapers that block caching/archiving of their webpages 
> is large; as is the set that is moving online; we can also expect the 
> set of newspapers that will fail or merge in coming years to be large 
> as well. The union of these 3 sets is, I think, nonzero.
> And that is a problem our conventional solutions (treat it as a 
> print-ref; use an archived copy) don't address. I don't really have a 
> solution, but I can predict that editors will continue to use them at 
> their convenience, and that our articles will be damaged by those 
> references' link-rot.
>
> (A pity that the big archivers are so damn ethical!)

I don't think that Murdoch's proposal is viable in the long run.  Who 
will be wanting to pay for so much ephemeral material.  What would it 
say of readers who bind themselves to one site because that is all they 
can afford only one subscription?  How are they to know that they are 
not being told about alternative perspectives on the same story?  I 
think that the entire news reporting industry is in deep trouble, and 
that citizen journalism and crowdsourcing have not yet built up the 
strength and credibility to pick up the slack.

Ec