Let’s open the gates to paid content news models
It is becoming urgent to work on how we can expand the reach of paid quality journalism to everyone
As a journalist, I have always been concerned about the reach and impact our news stories have on audiences. I began at Le Monde, the French print and digital media company based in Paris, more than 20 years ago. I was excited to join such a prestigious organization, but I was concerned by the fact that I was going to work for an outlet that mostly targeted an elite audience. I wanted to reach the broader public, to feed quality journalism to a wider audience. Then I realized that Le Monde could have a bigger scope beyond its core readership, due to its very impactful stories. So I decided to stay in this beautiful company with which I share so many values.
Twenty years later, my old concerns have come back, but the media landscape has totally changed. A few years ago, after 13 years as a reporter at Le Monde, I jumped to management in my newsroom, moving from print to the digital edition, and joining an innovation team. I was specifically in charge of rethinking and strengthening our paid content model and increasing our subscriber rate. I worked hard with my team to convince the newsroom that we had to quit offering a free model, based on the advertising market, and we needed to create a stronger subscriber audience. It worked: Le Monde’s subscriber base has increased 20 to 30 percent every year since then. And we have entirely redesigned our website to promote more paid content on it.
Like Le Monde, all the big legacy media have shifted gradually to a digital subscription model over the last few last years. This is good for these newsrooms, as they can now rely on a sustainable model to expand and promote quality and independent journalism. But at the same time, the media landscape has been profoundly shaken by a wave of disinformation and all kinds of “stories,” available for free. I became more and more concerned by the incredible polarization and fragmentation of the media. It occurred to me that if we do not pay attention, we could end up with a wide gap between the people who get quality news by paying (in a way, elite or upper-class readers), and those who can’t pay or don’t want to pay, and who stick to easy-reading news (in the best cases), or disinformation (in the worst).
That was my concern and the project I planned to work on when I arrived at Stanford as a JSK Journalism Fellow in September. At a time when populism is on the rise, fueled by disinformation and attacks on the media, access to quality and independent journalism — a foundation of freedom of speech and democracy — is at stake every day. This is an uphill battle since surveys show that even though the subscription model is expanding, only a minority of people agree to pay for their news (14 percent, according to the 2018 edition of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report.
And there is more than the cost factor: a new survey from the Reuters Institute shows an “important growing social inequality in news use” between people with low and high incomes. In other words, the digitization of media has not expanded access to news for poor people, even if it is free; on the contrary, the profusion of media has exacerbated inequality in news access and how people are informed.
In that context, it is becoming urgent to work on how we can expand the reach of quality journalism to everyone, and especially to people who can’t afford it or have no idea how to get good news. But how could I begin to work on a such a big challenge? What could be my pathway to address that? After thinking about how I could proceed, I decided to divide my question into three different buckets:
- The business model issue: How can we imagine different types of subscriptions or ways of paying for news that could make it more available to wider audiences? There is a lot of thinking and creativity on that subject since the subscription model has increased, and I want to learn more about all of those experiences.
- The reach issue: How can we create bridges between legacy media and a larger audience, or find support in institutions like libraries, which are already in contact with large communities? There is a lot to learn about how these institutions provide access to news and knowledge to the larger public.
- The media literacy issue: How can we better explain what journalism is today, and how people can find their own path in a forest of news? Librarians, teachers, and journalists are planning ways we can help people better understand the media landscape.
Many people are concerned about or are working on these three issues, especially in the U.S., and I am eager to talk to them. I have set up a list of contacts for each topic, which grows every week, as my project has become clearer in my mind. I plan to reach out to them during my next quarter at Stanford and to talk with as many people as I can. If you are interested/concerned/involved, or if you just want to react to my topic, please reach out to me; I would love to chat (prieur@stanford.edu). I will keep you posted on my findings in the coming months as my journey at Stanford continues.
