Paywalls are backward-looking

“Mathew Ingram, writing in GigaOm, offers three reasons he doesn't like paywalls. His second reason is ‘Paywalls are backward-looking, not forward-looking,’ which is the one that resonates with me. Before the Internet, news orgs had a natural paywall, the distribution system. If you wanted to read the paper you had to buy the paper. And the ink, and the gasoline it took to get it to where you are. In fact, everything that determined the structure of the news activity, that made it a business, was organized around the distribution system.   But that's been over now for quite some time. And paywalls express a desperate wish to go back to a time when there was a reason to pay. Now news, if it wants to continue, must find a new reason. I think there are plenty of ideas here. But linear problem-solution thinking won't get you there. This is the box we have to get out of. Because change comes whether or not our minds can conceive of it. That's the magic of new generations. Their minds are not limited the way ours are The model of news we used to practice was started to solve a business problem. A guy named Reuters who lived in London, wanted to know what was going on in the markets elsewhere in Europe. He found that the faster he got this information, the more money he could make. Then he learned that he could sell access to the flow of information for even more money. Then he wanted information from America. So he invested some of his profits from Europe in better ways of doing that... That's a simplification of course, but it's the basic idea... And eventually a new model emerged, of news as entertainment that could cause people to watch advertisements... But the Internet in NYC is a lot like news flow in Europe before Reuters revolutionized it. It really sucks for most of us. Why couldn't someone make it their business to solve this problem? If they do, I believe they will become the news organization of the future. Assuming people still want to live in NYC... I think you have to look at things this way. Where are the inefficiencies, and can you do something to erase them? If so, that's probably a good business... Most big news thinkers are not business people, so they don't seem to understand this. But the tech guys do think this way. And that's why that's where the new forward-looking movement is coming from.  Paywalls go the other way, they remove efficiencies. It's hard to see how, long-term, that can be profitable.  What paywalls are really asking is how are the news people of the past going to hold their lock on the flow of information in the future. And that's not a great question, because the answer is they aren't. Let's hope no one does. But of course that's a lot to hope for.”