One of the most common arguments against news website paywalls is what I call the infinite replication assertion. Sounds complicated, but all it means is this: No one will pay for online news, because any story that a subscriber-only site does will be quickly replicated by an infinite number of free websites and blogs.
Unfortunately, the premise of this argument is, at first glance, sound. A recent study by the Fair Syndication Consortium found that in one month, more than 75,000 unlicensed websites, also known as aggregators, had reused content from U.S. newspapers, including 112,000 near-exact copies of articles.
But many of the paywall naysayers draw their experience from major news markets like New York, where big stories from papers like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal do tend to get picked up by The Associated Press, then spread across the web like wildfire.
Here's the problem: Most of us don't live in New York City. Most of us live in much smaller towns like Milwaukee or St. Louis, or in the suburbs. And many if not most of us get our news from local papers, small- and medium-sized publications whose online stories probably aren't glamorous enough to be aggregated by the Huffington Post.
And while this may come as a shock to some media bigwigs, many of us out in the hinterlands are actually interested in local news.
Sure, we want to keep up with the war in Afghanistan and the fight over the budget deficit. But if I want to know how the public schools that my kids attend are doing, or find out if my property taxes are going up, or know whether the local zoning board approved a new mall on the edge of town, chances are I'll need to check my local paper for that.
And who's to say that people wanting such local news wouldn't be willing to fork over something for it, either by paying for access to the paper's website or by subscribing to the print version and getting free access to the website thrown in?
A Big Local Paper in Arkansas
At the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, for instance, subscribers to the printed paper get full access to the website. That helps keeps the paper in the black, since much of its revenue comes from printed display ads.
The Democrat-Gazette's website's paywall "has been very effective in maintaining our print circulation," says Conan Gallaty, the paper's online director. "Our goal is to make sure we don't have people moving from print to online just to get our information for free."
The Democrat-Gazette is the state's largest paper, with a daily circulation of 169,000, and 258,000 on Sunday. Despite its size, it's still at heart a local paper read by residents who are looking for local news.
Of course, local papers increasingly face competition of their own from citizen journalism and hyperlocal journalism blogs and websites, along with bigger operations like Patch.com, a network of local news websites across the country that is overseen by America Online.
But citizen and hyperlocal journalism sites tend to have far fewer reporters than local papers, which means they usually can't provide the same depth and breadth of news coverage.
There's also local TV news, but as anyone's who's watched a local TV newscast lately can attest, the focus is generally on crime, crime and more crime. Other issues tend to get short shrift.
So for now at least, the best source of local news remains your local newspaper. The only difference is that instead of paying to have the paper delivered to your front door, more and more readers will be paying for access to the paper's website.
