The Huffington Post’s “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” headline has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.” 2016 photo via the Voice of America.
Recently a source in The Boston Globe newsroom forwarded to me a memo sent to the staff about the paper’s performance in Google search during 2024. “We get 25%-27% of our traffic from Google; it’s a significant way we reach people who don’t come to the Globe on their own,” wrote Ronke Idowu Reeves, the paper’s SEO editor. (SEO stands for search-engine optimization.)
As you might imagine, the big SEO winners in 2024 were the Karen Read trial, the phrase “who won the debate” (perhaps a reference to both presidential debates), the Celtics victory parade and Steward Health Care.
The memo, though, prompted another thought: What is the purpose of SEO in the age of paywalls? As you probably know, the Globe has an especially strict paywall, with no quota of gift links for the month. I emailed Reeves and asked her whether SEO was successful in getting casual visitors to sign up for a digital subscription given that they couldn’t read even the one story they’d searched for. She forwarded my email to spokeswoman Carla Kath, who told me by email: “Yes, a good number of people do read and subscribe to our stories that they encounter on search. But, because the scope of search is constantly changing, we are always adjusting how we approach it.”
It’s something I’d like to dig into more deeply at some point since it’s fundamental to the economics of digital news. Twenty years ago, paywalls were rare, and the idea behind SEO was to drive massive audiences to your stories so that they’d see the ads that accompanied them. The first iteration of The Huffington Post stressed SEO heavily, and its infamous 2011 headline “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.”
The Salt Lake Temple in Salt Lake City, part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The city is served by The Salt Lake Tribune, the first nonprofit legacy newspaper in the U.S. Photo (cc) 2006 by Ken Lund.
Should nonprofit news organizations place their journalism behind a paywall?
There is considerable precedent that suggests they should not. Public television and radio are free, though they depend on grant money and donations from, you know, viewers (and listeners) like you. There’s also an educational mission and significant tax advantages that come with nonprofit status, and you could argue that they should make their journalism free in return for those benefits.
The Institute for Nonprofit News, for instance, begins its mission statement this way:
Nonprofit news is created for, supported by, and committed to the communities it serves. Through reporters who have deep community ties and topical expertise, nonprofit news elevates untold stories, exposes wrongdoing, and provides the facts we need to make informed decisions. And because most of this content is available without paywalls or subscription fees, nonprofit news makes essential information available to everyone — not just those who can afford it.
That falls short of an explicit statement of disapproval when it comes to nonprofits and paywalls, but it comes kind of close.
Yet Ellen Clegg and I found in our reporting for “What Works in Community News” that a few nonprofit news outlets do charge for their journalism, though most do not. Among those with paywalls are two digital-only sites: the Daily Memphian, which is part of our book, and The Baltimore Banner.
Both of these employ large staffs and aim to serve as complete replacements for the shrunken legacy papers they compete against. Such projects are expensive, and their leaders can hardly be faulted for concluding they need to charge for their journalism just as most for-profits do. Both find ways to make their journalism affordable for folks who may not be as well-heeled as their regular subscribers.
Another nonprofit with a paywall is The Salt Lake Tribune, the first legacy daily newspaper to embrace that model. Writing at Nieman Lab, Sarah Scire reports that the Tribune would like to end its dependence on a paywall at some point and is even now making much of its journalism free. She quotes from the Tribune’s annual report:
We’ve raised $340,000 and counting to fully remove the paywall on all of our election coverage ahead of the critical 2024 races. We’re not there yet from an income point of view to make our website free, but we hope to grow our donor base and income to the point that we’ll be able to open everything up to everyone.
Yet she also observes that even though the Tribune is growing, it remains dependent on paid subscriptions. Last year, for instance, subscribers were responsible for $5 million of the Tribune’s $15 million in revenues. Much of the rest comes from donors and advertising.
The bottom line is that even nonprofit news outlets need to bring in enough money to fulfill their mission. In the end, readers don’t really care whether their local news is owned by a nonprofit for a for-profit; Scire reports that only about a third of residents even know that the paper is nonprofit. What they want is a news source that’s comprehensive and reliable.
Old-school paywalls. Photo (cc) 2008 by Dan Kennedy.
•Are we really doing this again? Richard Stengel argues in the paywall-protected Atlantic (free link) that news organizations should publish their journalism for free during the 2024 campaign lest readers be driven to non-paywalled sources of misinformation and disinformation. He provides no advice on how these news organizations are supposed to pay their journalists, and he makes no mention of the many high-quality sources of free news that still exist — among them The Associated Press, NPR, the PBS “NewsHour,” The Guardian, BBC News, local public radio and television stations, national network newscasts and local TV newscasts. You may disdain that last suggestion, but surveys show that local TV news is the most trusted source of journalism we have, and it’s an important source of breaking news.
•Still more on the internal crisis at NPR. Alicia Montgomery, who held several high leadership posts at NPR before moving to Slate, has written her own essay about what’s wrong with the network’s culture, partly in response to Uri Berliner, partly to get a few things of her own off her chest. Montgomery’s essay is nuanced, and she acknowledges that NPR’s culture can be more than a little twee. But here’s the money quote: “In another meeting, I and a couple of other editorial leaders were encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” That certainly reflects my experience as a listener — that though NPR may tilt left on culture, its coverage of politics too often indulges in both-sides-ism at its most reductionist. And here’s yet another piece prompted by Berliner’s essay, this one by NPR anchor Steve Inskeep.
•Two digital news giants walk into a room… Richard Tofel, a founder and former president of the investigative nonprofit ProPublica, recently interviewed Evan Smith, a founder and the former CEO of The Texas Tribune, the largest statehouse nonprofit in the U.S. My colleague Ellen Clegg, who wrote about the Tribune for our book, “What Works in Community News,” offers her perspective on the encounter — which took place not in a room but in Tofel’s must-read newsletter, “Second Rough Draft.” As Ellen writes: “When two legends in digital publishing sit down to talk in unvarnished terms about the past, present and future of nonprofit journalism, it’s worth noting. And reading.”
Roy Wood Jr. is wrong, and so are the journalists who are nodding their heads in agreement with him. Wood’s lament, expressed at the White House Correspondents Dinner over the weekend, was that quality news is increasingly inaccessible to those who either won’t or can’t pay for it, whereas propaganda, lies and conspiracy theories are all available for free.
“The issue with good media is that most people can’t afford that,” the comedian said during his monologue. “All the essential, fair, and nuanced reporting is stuck behind a paywall. People can’t afford rent. People can’t afford food. They can’t afford an education. They damn sure can’t afford to pay for the truth.”
Offering an approving “amen” is Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, who wrote:
Wood was getting at one of the most consequential questions facing the news: how to pay for it at a time of severe economic insecurity and amid a business-model collapse in how journalism is funded. A tiered system has emerged, with high-quality news outlets like [The New York] Times and The Washington Post that depend on subscriptions for support sitting atop a heap of free news providers fueled by social media.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it’s not even remotely true. There has never been more free, high-quality news available than there is today, and you don’t have to look very far to find it. Wood and Pope are referring specifically to paywalls, so I’ll assume that they regard non-paywalled news sites as “free,” notwithstanding the cost of digital devices and an internet connection. With that assumption as a baseline, let’s think this through, shall we?
I’ll begin by saying that I pay for a lot of news, with subscriptions to The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Talking Points Memo. I have access to The Wall Street Journal through my university, and I also donate to a number of news outlets, mostly local, in order to support projects that Ellen Clegg and I are writing about in our book-in-progress, “What Works in Community News.” But that doesn’t mean that paid subscriptions are the only route to being well-informed.
So let’s take a look at how people who insist on free might go about informing themselves. I’m going to stick with major U.S.-based news outlets that cover a full range of topics and that are not explicitly skewed toward one political point of view.
I’ll start with national and international news. NPR is one of our great news organizations. Despite some recent cutbacks, its on-air signal, website, newsletters and podcasts comprise a source of reliable news and information that is almost as comprehensive as the Times’. PBS doesn’t offer nearly as much news as NPR, but the “NewsHour” is excellent, if a little slow, and its “Frontline” documentaries are outstanding. And let’s not forget The Associated Press, whose world-class coverage is available to the public for free as well as to news organizations for a fee.
The options in the Boston area are many as well. No, there is nothing as comprehensive as the Globe, but that’s not the same as saying there’s nothing. Excellent free sources of regional coverage include WBUR,GBH News and CommonWealth Magazine. There’s the indispensable Universal Hub, which provides a combination of aggregation (some of it from unlikely sources) and original reporting. Our local television newscasts offer quality coverage, too. And let’s be honest: If the Globe breaks a big story, other outlets are going to summarize it.
Coverage thins out at the local level, because in many cases there simply aren’t any options, either paid or free. A number of communities in the suburbs and beyond are now covered by very good nonprofit news organizations, and nearly all of those are free. A few legacy newspapers are still published, but you have to pay for those. At the moment, it depends on where you live.
Now, a caveat: Nearly every news organization I’ve mentioned subsists on revenue from a variety of sources, including readers, listeners and viewers like you. So yes, they’re free if you choose not to pay, or if you can’t. But if you can, you should support the news that you consume.
Still, the notion that everyone who can’t afford a subscription to The New York Times is doomed to a steady diet of Fox News and Alex Jones is just silly. The Wild West days of the internet, when everything was free, are long gone, but that doesn’t mean there still aren’t plenty of high-quality free options. If people choose to gorge on garbage, well, I’m sorry, but that’s a choice they’ve made.
You might look at it as the arrival of podcasts as a big business. My fear about what it really means is that the golden age of podcasts is coming to an end.
Anne Steele of The Wall Street Journal (one of our great Northeastern journalism graduates, by the way) reports on the looming podcast war between Apple, Spotify and a few smaller players. It sounds like it’s going to be just like video streaming services — if you subscribe to Spotify, as I do, you won’t be able to listen to podcasts that are exclusively on Apple, and vice-versa.
Steele quotes a business analyst named Daniel Ives as saying this about Apple:
Even though they have the keys to the kingdom in terms of overall customer base and the App Store and broader content, what’s going to differentiate them is not just aggregation, it’s exclusive content.
Just what we need — another walled garden. And look, I’m glad that this will enable podcasters to make some money beyond the ad revenue they get from the likes of MailChimp and Dollar Shave. But it also represents the end of something special — just as the rise of paywalls about a dozen years ago ended the open web.
The Telegram & Gazette of Worcester is hardening its paywall. Currently you can access seven stories a month before you are asked to pay. Now the T&G, as well as other Gannett papers, is going to remove “investigative stories, political commentary, sports analysis and other content found only on telegram.com.” More routine stories and public-safety coverage will remain within the seven-story allotment.
Look, I get it. But what I don’t like about this is that there are those of us who might need to download two or three stories a year from various papers around the country. Last year, I actually took out a subscription to an out-of-state paper for a month — and then had to call several times so I could cancel it after the reporting project I was working on was done.
I’ve long thought papers ought to be flexible enough to charge for $1 an article or to sell day passes to people for whom a monthly digital subscription doesn’t make sense. But I’ve been told it’s not cost-effective, as it would be difficult to set up and could take away from subscription sales.
I also hope that whatever extra money the company pulls in will be used for journalism and not to service Gannett’s massive debt.
Is this a new golden age of journalism? It all depends on who’s getting the gold.
For consumers of news, these are the best of times. Thanks to the Internet, we are awash in quality journalism, from longstanding bastions of excellence such as The New York Times and The Guardian to start-ups that are rising above their disreputable roots such as BuzzFeed and Vice News.
For producers of news, though, the challenge is to find new ways of paying for journalism at a time when advertising appears to be in terminal decline.
The optimistic and pessimistic views got an airing recently in a pair of point/counterpoint posts. Writing in Wired, Frank Rose gave the new smartphone-driven media ecosystem a thumbs up, arguing that mobile — rather than leading to shorter attention spans — has actually helped foster long-form journalism and more minutes spent reading in-depth articles. Rose continued:
Little wonder that for every fledgling enterprise like Circa, which generates slick digests of other people’s journalism on the theory that that’s what mobile readers want, you have formerly short-attention-span sites like BuzzFeed and Politico retooling themselves to offer serious, in-depth reporting.
That Rose-colored assessment brought a withering retort from Andrew Leonard of Salon, who complained that Rose never even mentioned the difficulties of paying for all that wonderful journalism.
“The strangest thing about Rose’s piece is that there isn’t a single sentence that discusses the economics of the journalism business,” Leonard wrote, adding: “If you are lucky, you might be able to command a freelance pay rate that hasn’t budged in 30 years. But more people than ever work for nothing.”
To support his argument, Leonard linked to a recent essay on the self-publishing platform Medium by Clay Shirky, a New York University professor who writes about Internet culture. Shirky, author of the influential 2009 blog post “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” as well as books such as “Here Comes Everybody” and “Cognitive Surplus,” predicted that advertising in print newspapers is about to enter its final death spiral. That’s because Sunday inserts are about to follow classified ads and many types of display ads into the digital-only world, where retailers will be able to reach their customers in a cheaper, more targeted way. Here’s how Shirky put it:
It’s tempting to try to find a moral dimension to newspapers’ collapse, but there isn’t one. All that’s happened is advertisers are leaving, classifieds first, inserts last. Business is business; the advertisers never had a stake in keeping the newsroom open in the first place.
There’s no question that print will eventually go away, though it may survive for a few more years as a high-priced specialty product for people who are willing to pay for it. The dilemma of how to pay for journalism, though, is not going away.
Free online news supported solely by advertising has not proven to be a reliable business model, although there are exceptions, including a few well-managed hyperlocals, like The Batavian in western New York, and sites that draw enormous audiences while employing very few people, like The Huffington Post.
Digital paywalls that require users to pay up after reading a certain number of articles have helped bolster the bottom lines of many newspapers, including The Boston Globe. But very few have been able to generate a significant amount of revenue from paywalls, with The New York Times being a notable exception.
It may turn out that the most reliable path for journalism in the digital age is the nonprofit model, with foundations, wealthy individuals and small donors picking up the tab. It’s a model that has worked well for public television and radio, and that is currently supporting online news organizations both large (ProPublica) and small (the New Haven Independent). But nonprofits are hardly a panacea. The pool of nonprofit money available for journalism is finite, and in any case the IRS has made it difficult for news organizations to take advantage of nonprofit status, as I wrote for The Huffington Post in 2013.
Journalism has never been free. Someone has always paid for it, whether it was department stores taking out ads in the Sunday paper or employers buying up pages and pages of help-wanted ads in the classifieds. Today, the most pressing question for journalists isn’t whether we are living in another golden age. Rather it’s something much blunter: Who will pay?
There’s a bit of non-baseball news at the end of Boston Globe baseball reporter Peter Abraham’s latest:
Finally, a programming note. All our written content will be exclusively in the Globe and on BostonGlobe.com from now on. That includes Nick Cafardo, Dan Shaughnessy, Chris Gasper, Julian Benbow and me. The Extra Bases blog on Boston.com will not have contributions from Globe baseball reporters.
The move is in accord with an announcement recently made by Globe editor Brian McGrory, so it’s not really a surprise — more of a confirmation. With the Globe’s online paywall a lot leakier than it used to be, there’s really no need for cross-platform sharing anymore.
Earlier today Media Nation obtained a copy of a message from Sean Burke, president and group publisher of GateHouse Media New England, announcing that GateHouse will experiment with metered paywalls at three of its daily papers — The MetroWest Daily News of Framingham, The Enterprise of Brockton and The Milford Daily News. At a fourth daily, The Herald News of Fall River, the company will try a premium/freemium model.
GateHouse Media, based in suburban Rochester, N.Y., owns more than 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts, most of them weeklies. The full text of Burke’s message follows.
Gatehouse Mass. dailies going to “metered model”:
To: All GateHouse Media New England Employees
From: Sean Burke
Date: 3/4/2014
Re: The Meters Are Here!
Team,
Today we are pleased to announce that we are under taking a very important and strategic step in the future of our business by introducing tactics to eliminate unlimited free access to our content.
Sean Burke (via LinkedIn)
For years now, it’s bothered me that we essentially undervalue the efforts of our hardworking journalists by giving away their content free on our websites. Plus, we do everything we can to drive people to our free content, through social media, promotions and more. On the circulation side the cannibalization of our own best efforts is clear to see: We ask people to pay for our print publications, while increasingly pointing them toward digital, where they can consume most if not all of the print content free.
We have been providing this value to readers and visitors for years, free of charge, and at the detriment of our core business, our paid print publications. As increasing numbers of readers choose digital options to satisfy their news and information needs, the circulation of our newspapers continues to trend downward.
No more. Today begins a paid content strategy on three of our daily newspaper sites:
MetroWestDailyNews.com, MilfordDailyNews.com and Enterprisenews.com. These sites will test what is called a “metered model.” Users will have access to 15 free articles each month. After reaching the limit, they will trigger a prompt that will give them a variety of payment options to allow them to continue to access content. We’re starting the meter high – allowing a higher level of free content – then we will begin to lower it, testing along the way, to find the optimum level. As always, readers can view an unlimited number of exclusive breaking news stories and community features on the home page, as well as enjoying full access to obituaries, section fronts and video.
In Fall River, at The Herald News, we’ll be testing a different model, which we refer to as “freemium/premium.” This model capitalizes upon the differing levels of consumption and engagement by our readers through versioning. We’ll continue to offer plenty of content to our more casual readers, but it will be just the basics of stories. We’ll ask readers who want a richer, more in-depth, interactive, multi-layered, and multimedia experience to join our brands as paid “members.”
In conjunction with this model we will launch a consumer loyalty and membership program, Herald News Perks, which gives “members” access to exclusive deals, contests and events beyond content.
We plan to learn a great deal from our initial venture into paid online content with these models, striving to emerge with refined approaches for what resonates in our many individual markets. Along the way, I invite your feedback on what you think works, what doesn’t and ideas for how we might continue to demonstrate the value of all of our products across all platforms.
Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory made a series of announcements earlier today about changes and appointments inside the Globe newsroom. His memo is online at Poynter. The most important news is that the Globe’s digital paywall is being lowered to allow access to 10 free articles a month before non-subscribers are asked to pay.
The spin on McGrory’s announcement is that this represents some sort of 180-degree turn. It doesn’t. It is a significant adjustment, but the Globe has been tweaking the paywall ever since its debut in the fall of 2011. About a year ago, for instance, I wrote a story for the Nieman Journalism Lab that the Globe was tightening up on social sharing in the hopes of persuading more people to pay. Now it’s moving in the other direction. But mid-course corrections have been part of the strategy from the beginning.
Not to get ahead of the story, but I wonder if the Globe’s move toward a much looser paywall might lead to the eventual abandonment of its two-site strategy — the paid BostonGlobe.com site and the free Boston.com. Yes, McGrory also announced some new appointments for Boston.com. But what’s now Boston.com content could be folded into BostonGlobe.com as free, online-only content that supplements the paid material. Newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post have large amounts of online-only content but only one site.
A number of people I’ve talked with find the two-site strategy confusing. I have a more basic complaint: as a paying subscriber, I don’t think I should have to go to Boston.com for anything, whether it be Red Sox items or lottery numbers. It should all be on the site that I’m paying for.
McGrory’s announcement signals not a revolution but an evolution. It will be interesting to see what comes next.
Update: Gin Dumcius points out that McGrory’s memo says the two sites will remain separate and may even compete with each other. I want to emphasize that I don’t think the end of the two-site strategy is coming any time soon. I just think the machinery has been set in motion so that it might eventually make sense.
