Content in a time of Corona
Inspired by these unusual and interesting times, this is a meditation on why access to information should be, but isn’t, a fundamental human right. A manifesto, a train of thought experiment and an unplanned call to arms.
While the Washington Post wasn’t the first to offer readers free access to its coronavirus content, usually behind a paywall, it was the wording of their statement that caught my eye more than any others I’d seen. It read:
“The Washington Post is providing this story for free so that all readers have access to this important information about the coronavirus.”
This triggered a revisit to a long-fought internal struggle of mine. In my ongoing, impassioned, gesticulating debates about ethical design with colleagues, friends and anyone on the street who will listen, this is one that tends to stump me. You see, I sit on both sides of the table.
As a content creator (though not gainfully employed in this context) I have always been an aspiring editor-in-chief. Obsessed with reading, enamored with writing, my first CV was a creative take on a magazine cover, photoshoot and all, courtesy of my digital Olympus, a Christmas gift that year.
Today, hand me a copy of the New Yorker, Monocle, of the New York Times, of Kinfolk, of Vanity Fair, and I’ll always do the exact same thing before I do anything else. I flip to the second or third page where nestled between the most premium of ad pages you will find the masthead: or as I like to think of them, the credits. Like making a movie, it takes a small village to put together a publication of any size, as I am currently learning from our foray into a multi-lingual, multi-language content strategy to support our communities with quality content during this new era that is Corona Times (sadly not the name of a niche magazine I just launched, but I digress.)
The reason I visit this page first is to pay my respects to the reason the magazine exists in the first place, to remember that in order for me to have access to this art, someone’s blood, sweat, and tears went into it, and they deserve to be recognised. In fact, they deserve to be celebrated! There is no one more famous in my world than an editor-in-chief, except Nigella Lawson perhaps, but that’s an article for another issue of Corona Times…
So whenever I find myself in a debate about this newish content model, that pits Subscription against Advertising, I prefer the first. Content creators deserve to be compensated, and I prefer my euros in the pockets of those that do the creating, not the advertisers that try to distract me from it.
For decades, nobody ever protested to having to pay for a newspaper, then affordable to almost everyone, especially when we only knew it as a physical object that you tucked into your elbow as you hurried home from the shops. Nobody ever stopped to imagine that this service should, in fact, be free.
With the advent of the Internet however, capitalised as it was when it first appeared in all its glory, and a ubiquity of content everywhere (and for free of course), a new kind of expectation was born. Suddenly, no one wanted to pay for the Times when someone on Tumblr or Twitter had the same news to share as everyone else, and an opinion to boot!
I am a vocal supporter of both print and digital media, and have been excited by the ways some of my favourite content creators have approached the digital revolution: innovating where they could, and building on their legacies where they were able. Monocle and the New York Times are my favourite examples, and I am a proud subscriber to both. The value I get for a few euros every month are worth it.
But a few euros is not where the story ends. Today more prestigious publications are finding themselves in a bind, knowing that they can’t maintain the readership volumes of free publications, so they are forced to drive their prices up, reliant on a small group of subscribers. The Economist. The Wall Street Journal. The Information. The Financial Times.
With so many quality titles all with enviable mastheads, access to these costs far more than a Netflix subscription or several Starbucks lattes a month, and this is where it gets problematic. Not because the blood, sweat and tears of these journalists is not worthy, but because this now makes the content they create inaccessible to most, so what you are left with is the haves and the have nots. Those who are in the know and are informed, and those who are left to forage for crumbs of information, and in these Corona Times, often misinformation, as they remain reliant on those in power (translation: with the means) to tell them what they need to know.
“Quality journalism costs money. We know — and we never forget — where that money comes from: from you, the readers. Our financial strength is the bedrock of our independence, and the guarantee of our future as a world-class business newspaper. We were one of the first media companies in the world to introduce a paywall, and today we are more confident than ever that this is the right model for the FT.”
— An excerpt from FT editor-in-chief Roula Khalaf’s letter to its readers
When I joined Medicus, what drew me the most was the company’s mission and Baher’s vision to democratize health data: Helping people understand their health by arming them with information and meaning about their cryptic health data. I was sold. Information has been power for a very long time, and in every aspect of our lives, and in order for our society to have any kind of fighting chance at achieving true equal opportunity, this would mean equal opportunity to all kinds of information…
But when one has access to information about our changing (and today, very scary) world that others do not, we find ourselves in a fundamentally unequal premise, right from the get-go. Some with a head start, an “insider trading” position when it comes to Life, while others already behind, dependent on those in the know to do the thinking.
In this paradigm, a paywall is no longer just a business model, it is a tool of systemic inequality, a tool for the perpetuation of elitism and the unbalanced access to the fundamental right which I so ardently champion, the right to information.
So where does that leave us? In today’s world, information is power, and this has never been as relevant as it is today. With the controversy around access to tests for COVID-19, it is clear to see how access to health data is something we all crucially believe is every person’s right, and is the reason we continue to be outraged by the unfair access to tests in many parts of the world, usually determined by your means and your power.
And where does that leave me? Where do I sit in this debate now? Does this help me see more value in the concept of Universal Basic Income, which would allow content creators to create, without obsessing about the bottom line? Does it push me a little more left than the centre position I traditionally take, allowing me to see the value in the gospel of Bernie?
There is no good answer in today’s landscape. What we have fashioned with the paywall is a band-aid solution, one that works for some, but not for most. But there is precedent for change, a revolution even, and an opportunity to innovate in these unusual Corona Times we are all facing together. I am hopeful, always looking for that silver lining, and for new and better ways as a society to provide this fundamental human right.
