During the height of the primary election season, around the start of April this year, I’d had enough.
Four months after completing my master’s thesis about the role of social media, especially Facebook, in political protests and revolutions, I suspended my own Facebook account. Even people who I generally agree with politically had ratcheted up the vitriol so much that Facebook was no longer a pleasant virtual visit with friends for me. It was just people “yelling.”
I planned to start posting regularly again on Facebook after the November election; that hasn’t happened. I still feel somewhat estranged from my Facebook account.
One of the few things I regularly look at via my Facebook account, though, is the posts from my local newspaper, The Herald of Snohomish County. As a former journalist who worked for The Herald for nearly seven years, I’m interested in what they write, and it’s my local news source. The newspaper has a website, yet it’s often easier to just look up their articles via Facebook.
But what has caught my eye more than the articles lately are the “reply” posts under those. Online comments about newspaper articles often are negative; I understand that. But the
comments that have angered me anew are the ones complaining about having to pay for local news.
I don’t claim to be smarter than the average bear, but by the middle of the last decade, I saw the meteor about to hit the print media landscape. Newspapers weren’t adapting successfully or fast enough. I found a new career and have watched with sadness as the whole industry has gone through a precipitous loss of advertising revenue, resulting in massive layoffs and thinner newspapers hitting my front step.
I’m not rich, but I pay a dozen dollars a month to receive a printed newspaper three days a week and unlimited access to The Herald’s website. Not a bad deal to stay informed, I reason.
And I understand the annoyance with “pay walls,” which limit the access to news for those who don’t pay. I run up against them each month when I look at websites for The Seattle Times, The Washington Post and two or three other newspapers that I’m in the habit of visiting online.
Well-produced, relevant news can’t be given away, however. Someone has to support it. It used to be advertisers and, through subscriptions, readers. That’s the way it still works, even if you’re not holding a newspaper in your hands but rather reading it on a phone or laptop.
Instead, Facebook folks complain, posting comments like “Since I can't read the article without a paid subscription …?” and “Sure wish I could read these articles without being forced into a paid subscription!!!” Another reader also complained about having to see ads on the newspaper’s website, which finally goaded whoever oversees the newspaper’s Facebook site into responding: “Website ads don't even come close to covering the cost of our newsroom. Removing the ads for subscribers might be preferable, but that means we make even less money from the ads. The New York Times makes subscribers suffer through ads, too.”
It’s easy to say that the complainers are in the minority, and most of us understand newspapers need advertisers and readers to pay in order to support the gathering of news. But I’m not sure that’s true. I think many pay well more than $100 a month for lots of cable TV channels or a similar amount for top-notch, unlimited smartphone service but don’t think twice about their “right” to free, quality news.
If you don’t subscribe to a newspaper, find a spare dollar and buy a copy of one today. If you can afford even a basic subscription, subscribe to a newspaper. At a time when fake news stories and rumors threaten to overwhelm the real news, take a small step to support legitimate news-gathering operations. Thomas Jefferson would be proud of you.