The Verge raises a partial paywall: ‘It’s a tragedy that garbage is free and news is behind paywalls’
Vox Media’s technology-focused site announced Tuesday that it was rolling out its first sitewide subscription service, putting some content behind a paywall.
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If it is behind a paywall, it isnt news, it is an asset.
So physical newspapers aren’t news?
"Can I have that once you're finished with it?" Physical newspapers are subject to being given away by the original purchaser (or getting picked up from cafe tables or pulled from trashcans—people used to leave the damned things lying around everywhere), if you can't afford to pay for them. It's a bit more difficult to do that with digital content.
I guess gift links are a bit similar but obviously at a much smaller scale. I'm not sure how a fully similar digital system to sharing newspapers could be setup while still funding decent journalism.
I don't hate paywalls though because I get it but I can't say I've ever subscribed to get around one.
News papers are a physical item, not bits hidden behind a boolean set to true. Plus, I can go read a newspaper at the store if I want to.
You pay for information and not paper or pixels.
Information should be free. Putting it behind a paywall makes it so the less fortunate suffer by being kept out of the loop.
Information is free, it's the transmission medium (paper printing or webservers) and the journalist's wages that you should pay for.
That doesn't really address their point, that's simply a motte and bailey. Limiting access to information (knowledge/education) on a basis of payment is a hindrance of lower classes not upper classes. We especially see this with academic publishing and the people writing those papers aren't even paid for it usually.
You shouldn't have to pay for the journalist or the transmission, similarly to education it is best for a society (especially a democracy) if information is freely accessible regardless of one's finances.
I don't know about you, but I don't live in a utopia that works like this. Journalists have wages, web servers cost a lot of money to run. Printing presses and physical distribution channels also cost a lot of money. If information should be free, how should publishers pay for all of these labor and infrastructure costs?
Everything you said is true and I never implied it wasn’t I was just saying that information should be free. If I had an idea on how to make it work I’d be working on it