Newspaper subscriptions
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
So I read today that the Times plans to begin making “24-hour subscription” payments for access to it’s current daily edition online.The Guardian reported it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/17/times-editor-james-harding-online-charging
The decline of newspaper economics has been well reported and I guess I’m one of newspapers’ “worst customers”. I occasionally buy a Sunday Times – almost never a daily paper – but I read the Guardian UK pretty much every day because they are “enlightened” enough to publish their full content via RSS feeds. I read these feeds on my phone – whilst travelling or otherwise in need of content – and the good thing about the Guardian feeds is they are complete (not just a synopsis, requiring a visit to the website to read the rest like most other papers) and don’t contain any advertising.
I was thinking though about the Times’ editor’s comments – that it costs money to do high quality reporting and despite the “democratisation” of journalism in the form of blogging and amateur reporting online, this will never fully replace high quality newspaper journalism for reach, depth and fact-checking. I’ve never really thought about paying for my daily news, but after his comments I figured, maybe I would be happy to pay for my Guardian (or Times) RSS feed access – a small fee per day – to go towards keeping the high quality and unbiased reporting.After all I happily pay the BBC license fee which covers my (well used) Radio 4 Today programme daily listening, amongst others.
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