The Experience of Dynamic Media is a new book that fea­tures three projects and four essays of mine, from my time as an MFA stu­dent at the Dynamic Media Institute. Download the free PDF!

There has been a lot of grip­ing on the inter­webs about The New York Times’ deci­sion to start charg­ing for unlim­ited access to its online con­tent.

This is a com­pli­cated issue, and an emo­tional one. Yet unlike most peo­ple, I think this move actu­ally makes sense and, fur­ther, is a very good idea, not just for The New York Times, but for soci­ety as a whole. I value the Times, and I’m will­ing to pay for it. Here’s why:

Good jour­nal­ism has never been free. At least not until the Internet desta­bi­lized the mar­ket for good jour­nal­ism and changed everyone’s expec­ta­tions about how quickly and cheaply news could and should be deliv­ered to our eye­balls. The emer­gence of entirely “free” online news sources (includ­ing nytimes.com) is both a rel­a­tively recent phe­nom­e­non and also the rea­son for the recent grip­ing. Before online news, you had to either pur­chase a news­pa­per or watch tele­vi­sion, both of which were sub­si­dized by adver­tis­ers. But now we expect well-researched, accu­rate, and com­pre­hen­sive news reports deliv­ered within sec­onds, at no cost (to us).

Good jour­nal­ism should not be free. Investigative jour­nal­ism — the most impor­tant kind — is very expen­sive to pro­duce. Those exposés don’t write them­selves; pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists research and com­pose them. Then pro­fes­sional edi­tors decide which sto­ries are most impor­tant. Then pro­fes­sional design­ers cre­ate maps, info­graph­ics, and inter­ac­tive fea­tures to com­mu­ni­cate the com­plex­ity behind the stories.

Did I men­tion that all of these peo­ple are paid pro­fes­sion­als? Although they may love the work, they wouldn’t be able to do it if they didn’t get paid.

As a result, “free” news ser­vices can­not afford to fund the inten­sive, time-consuming research nec­es­sary for high-quality, public-informing, power-humbling jour­nal­ism. But inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of democ­racy; it is what exposes cor­rup­tion and informs the pub­lic. If only for that rea­son, its efforts deserve our finan­cial support.

Yet indi­vid­ual sub­scribers are not journalism’s sole ben­e­fi­cia­ries. Each mem­ber of soci­ety ben­e­fits, whether directly or indi­rectly, from journalism’s con­tri­bu­tion to the demo­c­ra­tic process. So pay­ing for good jour­nal­ism is like mak­ing a dona­tion in sup­port of democ­racy. If you can’t afford to donate, you still ben­e­fit. (Just don’t expect to be given access to all the arti­cles, except through a pub­lic por­tal, like a pub­lic library. Speaking of which, I hope the new pay­wall will not apply to libraries, but I haven’t found any infor­ma­tion on how it will be rolled out to insti­tu­tional accounts. Update: Institutional site licenses are in the works.)

Beyond that, our cap­i­tal­ist con­text ensures that free jour­nal­ism can’t be trusted. And I mean that lit­er­ally. When we pay for a news ser­vice, we, as the cus­tomer, are entrust­ing a news orga­ni­za­tion with our money, say­ing “Spend this wisely, and look into things that are impor­tant to me.” A no-cost paper is less trust­wor­thy sim­ply because its cus­tomers are its adver­tis­ers, not its read­ers. (In fact, we, the read­ers, are the “prod­uct” being sold to the advertisers.)

Free papers are given to us, not pur­chased by us, and there­fore the free news orga­ni­za­tion has no oblig­a­tion to address our con­cerns. We hold no power over free news; they exist to serve only their adver­tis­ers, not us.

On the other end of the spec­trum, valu­able news can be very expen­sive. Bloomberg made his bil­lions by sell­ing up-to-the-second infor­ma­tion on finan­cial mar­kets to cus­tomers who val­ued that infor­ma­tion, and they paid top dol­lar for it. The exchange of funds instills a level of account­abil­ity in the seller-buyer rela­tion­ship. The giver-taker rela­tion­ship has no such accountability.

Unfortunately, one down­side of this cap­i­tal­ist rela­tion­ship is that the seller is only account­able to its pay­ing cus­tomers. So peo­ple who are poor, illit­er­ate, une­d­u­cated, or oth­er­wise can­not pay for the news may be under­rep­re­sented in the news, and there­fore under­served by inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. Sadly, these are often the same peo­ple who are under­served by gov­ern­ment and other enti­ties with the most power and oppor­tu­nity to help this population.

This inequal­ity is often used to argue that news (and poten­tially every­thing else, at least online) should be free to all, since then the news would be more likely to serve us all, and serve us all equally. But this is like say­ing, “If there is one per­son who can’t afford it, then none of us should pay for it.” And with­out any pur­chas­ing of news, the news is account­able to no one but itself. Short of reform­ing cap­i­tal­ism at a fun­da­men­tal level so as to address all such inequal­i­ties (too much work!), maybe a bet­ter idea is for pay­ing news con­sumers to exert their lim­ited power to advo­cate for more ser­vice of the underserved.

Finally, philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sions aside, let’s talk about pric­ing. While the online dis­cus­sion has been focused on dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion, it’s impor­tant to acknowl­edge that this change will impact cir­cu­la­tion of the printed news­pa­per, too.

Why? Simply because it’s actu­ally cheaper to sub­scribe to home deliv­ery than to pay for the Times on all your devices. Note how

…all New York Times home deliv­ery sub­scribers will receive free access to NYTimes.com and to all con­tent on our apps.

I love get­ting the Sunday Times deliv­ered, on paper, to my doorstep. Reading the phys­i­cal, pixel-less paper is my trea­sured, Sunday-morning tra­di­tion. As it turns out, Sunday-only deliv­ery is $7.50 per week, or $30 for 4 weeks, or $390 per year.

That’s $5 less per month than the new “all dig­i­tal access” pack­age, which gives you the same unlim­ited access to nytimes.com and all of the Times’ apps, but with­out the plea­sure of the phys­i­cal paper. (If you pre­fer get­ting the phys­i­cal paper Monday through Friday, you can save 20 cents off that price each month.)

Plus, new sub­scribers get 50% off for the first 6 months, so really you could pay just $15 for full Times access — $20 less than the dig­i­tal package.

So the pric­ing plans are con­fus­ing, and of course they will evolve over time, as the Times and other news ser­vices exper­i­ment and iter­ate through dif­fer­ent pric­ing schemes. But as long as the price to indi­vid­u­als is within rea­son, and the ben­e­fit to soci­ety is so great, I think it’s worth it.

This could be so awesome.

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