Another Brick in the Paywall: The Clash Between Media Economics and Social Responsibility

tl;dr: Amazon et al. did it so Amazon et al. can undo it.

In the tug-of-war with tech giants that provide easy access to vast amounts of information, newspapers followed suit and moved online. A few years later, the relation between tech and traditional journalism is comparable to a trench war where newspapers hide behind walls.

Paywalls, or the subscription prompts aimed at readers who want to access content online, are a thing of the 2010s driven by the decline in subscription and advertising revenue. Being a recent trend, paywalls are yet to be proven as an effective way of boosting revenue especially for small- and medium-sized publications which have narrow, niche audiences.

There are three main types of paywalls depending on the amount of content users can access. While ‘hard’ paywalls prevent users from reading any articles without a subscription, ‘metered’ ones allow users to access a few articles for free for a certain period of time. For instance, readers of The New York Times can open 10 articles per month before they are asked to subscribe. Lastly, newspapers such as The Guardian give readers access to a certain amount of content along with advertisements but keep premium content such as investigative articles behind a ‘freemium’ paywall.

The Washington Post is one of the examples of newspapers of record which put up a metered paywall in an effort to secure its revenue that social media platforms have put in jeopardy. However, what distinguishes the newspaper from others is that since 2013 it has been under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, CEO of e-commerce giant Amazon.

In an attempt to secure the future of the newspaper, Donald Graham, the former owner of the Washington Post whose family had owned the newspaper since 1933, offered to sell the newspaper to Bezos.

In an interview, Bezos explains that Graham approached him because of his reputation as well-versed in the workings of the Internet. Though initially hesitant, Bezos bought the newspaper for $250 million. Whereas Bezos did not negotiate the price, to The Washington Post, the acquisition brought aid at a time of financial instability and new opportunities for growth.

“The Internet was just eroding all of the traditional advantages that local newspapers have. Every gift that the local newspaper had was systematically removed by the Internet,” Bezos said of the financial situation in the newspaper industry at the time when he bought The Washington Post. “There’s one gift that the Internet brings newspapers. It destroys almost everything but brings one gift and that is free global distribution.”

Indeed, since the transaction, the newspaper has hired more than 200 hundred journalists and has expanded its online presence . Yet it has also been called out for the conflicts of interest that might arise from its relationship with a huge corporation.

Undoubtedly, media outlets balance between the need to make profit to survive and their social responsibility to citizens which has been made even more difficult by the blend of news and innovation in entertainment (Seib & Fitzpatrick 1997). Furthermore, outlets’ independence in decision-making and publication is what their institutional credibility and reputation depend on (Plaisance 2014). That is why the measures outlets such as The Washington Post undertake in order to continue work also create the potential for a conflict of interests when owners and managers make editorial decisions (Seib & Fitzpatrick 1997).

For that reason, the relationship between The Washington Post, a legacy newspaper, and its owner, the CEO of the largest Internet company in terms of revenue, can be explained through the stockholders versus stakeholders theory. Viewing media outlets as business entities, the stockholder theory developed by Milton Friedman argues that the main moral obligation of outlets is to secure profit for their stockholders. On the other hand, Patricia Werhane distinguishes between the purposes and products of businesses and argues that services such as healthcare also need to cater to the needs of other stakeholders such as clients and consumers. Furthermore, what distinguishes news and information from other business products is their nature as “experience and credence” commodities which means that customers buy them first and determine whether that information is meaningful later on (Patterson & Wilkins 2014).

In the context of The Washington Post, that catering would pertain to the needs and rights of readers. An action to that end would be the removal of the paywall which would mean less profit for the newspaper and its owner but access to news for its audiences. Indeed, Bezos has taken a step in that direction by lifting the paywall for subscribers of local newspapers in some states. Those states, however, are areas where subscriptions to the print version of The Washington Post are scarce so the lift of the paywall can thus be seen as a profit-seeking move.

Some argue that newspapers should seek to improve the quality of their journalism, based on its inherent values such as impartiality and fairness, which, in turn, will ensure better sales and more revenue (Seib & Fitzpatrick 1997). Having a paywall, then, can actually put an outlet at risk if audiences do not value its content.

That risk is further deepened by the affiliation of the newspaper with the wealthiest person in the world and his large corporation. That affiliation can diminish the credibility of the newspaper before its audiences thus creating a vicious circle of relying on well-secured ownership to stabilize the newspaper but instilling a negative perception of the newspaper’s content because of that ownership.

Those risks extend beyond the corporate level of newspapers and bear implications for individual media professionals as well. In response to criticism on the relationship between Amazon and The Washington Post, Executive Editor Martin Baron has had to defend the reputation of the newspaper by emphasizing that Bezos does not involve in decisions related to news and coverage. With that in mind, a media professional should consider their own affiliation with media outlets whose credibility is put at risk through the affiliations they create.

References

Patterson, P. & Wilkins, L. (2014). Media Ethics: Issues & Cases (8th ed.). Singapore: McGraw-Hill Education.

Plaisance, P. L. (2014). Media Ethics: Key Principles for Responsible Practice (2nd ed.). United States: SAGE.

Seib, P. M. & Fitzpatrick, K. (1997). Journalism Ethics. Fort Worth, TX : Harcourt Brace College Publishers.