I received a couple of emails from Readers about my earlier piece on creeping paywalls, and indeed Jamie Wilson at PJMedia wrote a very polite rebuttal thereof.
Like I said in my earlier post, I understand exactly how this all works.
I mean, as someone who has been trying to support himself by writing for the past two decades, I understand completely the need for being paid for one’s work. I have no issue with that.
The problem I do have is that the cost of paywalls seems to be out of line with the product being offered. Back when TIME Magazine was actually worth reading, I used to give TIME subs as Christmas- or birthday gifts to friends and family. I don’t remember the cost, but it was something like $25 per annum — and that for a full magazine on a large number of topics of interest, not just politics, delivered weekly.
Compared to that, most online publications today fall woefully short. Even Cathy Gyngell’s excellent TCW from the UK doesn’t compare, and sad to say, neither does the PJMedia complex, nor even Breitbart. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy at that conservative stuff, oh yes I do. But my life isn’t just politics, as even a cursory look at my blog will show, and thus I can find little good reason to spend what seems to be an awful lot of money on what is, after all, a niche interest.
To properly entertain myself, I once worked out that I’d have to spend about $300 a month on subs. Won’t do it, even if I could afford it. And when I could afford it, I could certainly afford to spend $90 per annum on Britain’s Country Life magazine, about $100 per annum on various gun magazines, and $30 per annum on pubs like Foreign Interest and Bill Buckley’s National Review (back when it was also worth reading), and so on. All told, that’s much less than $300… a year.
When today’s online media can resolve the issue with micropayments, I would have no problem paying for Jamie’s or Stephen Green’s articles, as long as they cost me pennies. Hell, I sell my historical novels (usually, about 100,000 words or so) for a couple of dollars each on Amazon, and each one might have taken me about a full year to write, with all the research involved. A journalist/writer may charge, say, a dollar a word; but the publication needs to sell it to a reader for fractions of pennies — something which seems to have escaped our modern publications.
Right now, they don’t. Yes, a PJMedia sub doesn’t cost that much — but when they start writing content which can rival that of, say, a traditional daily newspaper (like the Daily Telegraph ) in terms of its breadth, I’ll think about it. Until then, no.
Note, by the way, that Jamie Wilson’s article is accessed through an Internet archive link because when I originally tried to get to it, I was blocked.