Syria Correspondent Wanted Her Reporting Read Outside Pay Walls - NYTimes.com

“Before her death on Wednesday in the besieged Syrian city of Homs, the veteran war correspondent Marie Colvin voiced a common frustration for journalists who are reporting from distant areas about conflicts that can feel remote to readers back home. But Ms. Colvin’s frustrations were also more particular than that: she worried that her accounts of indiscriminate bombing by forces loyal to the Syrian government were not able to reach the widest possible audience. Days before her death, she asked a fellow journalist to sidestep the online subscription requirement for her newspaper, The Sunday Times of London, and share her latest article from Syria with nonsubscribers. ‘Getting the story out from here is what we got into journalism for,’ she wrote in a message that was republished on Wednesday by Bill Neely, the international editor for ITV News in Britain. ‘You have my permission to post it, as in I will take the firing squad in the morning,’ Ms. Colvin said, indicating that her bosses might object to the reposting of her articles elsewhere. ‘I’m just not able to technically do it, as I am still in Baba Amr...’ Ms. Colvin’s final report from Baba Amr was posted on the Sunday Times Web site on Wednesday for nonsubscribers. On Wednesday, it appeared to be the only article by (or about) Ms. Colvin that could be read by nonsubscribers, including her obituary. Ms. Colvin’s concern about her newspaper’s pay wall while reporting in a besieged Syrian city illustrates what may be a central paradox of the digital media age — news organizations require revenue to employ foreign journalists and ensure that important information reaches the public, but to raise that revenue they opt to restrict access to that information to paying subscribers. Specifically, The Sunday Times and some other newspapers have business models that require readers to pay for online access just as they have historically paid for print access. While the online pay walls help cover journalists’ salaries in the first place, they limit the potential audience for the journalists’ information, a fact that some prominent journalists have bemoaned in recent years. Some pay walls are purposefully more permeable than others; The New York Times, for instance, allows nonsubscribers to read at least 20 articles a month before paying, and The Wall Street Journal allows a selection of top stories to be read free...”