Osama Bin Laden was killed yesterday and the reactions ranged from revelry to relief to wondering why the New York Times didn’t take down their paywall. C.W. Anderson, an assistant professor of media culture at CUNY tweeted, “NYT has a public obligation to place articles out from behind paywall in cases like this.”
Why on earth would they?
The Times has ten-thousand employees, all of which I’m sure will work over-time this week. In any other industry, when workers do more work, when they do more quality work that is life and earth changing, we pay them overtime. We reward them. We give them a raise.
But journalists? We devalue.
I don’t know where you were getting your news all day, but I was getting mine on NYTimes.com. And yes, in one day, I read through all twenty articles of my monthly limit.
The Nieman Journalism Lab reported that the New York Times has the ability to take down the paywall for breaking-news, must-read stories. But I imagine that would only be relevant for issues of public safety. “You should pull down your paywall when it will save lives,” argues Brian Boyer, an Editor at the Chicago Tribune. “If you pull it for big news, you’re missing the point, right?”
Right. I imagine that Anderson tweeted The Times should remove their paywall because he values the quality, in-depth and expert reporting that The Times provides and wishes that to be available to as many as possible. But there are already twenty free articles, and so those many aren’t going to be affected by the paywall on a day like today.
NYT readers are like adolescent children, wanting their freedom, ignoring the hand that feeds them at will, but come running back in a crisis. We may like our conversations and opinion on Twitter, Facebook and blogs every other day of the week, but when it comes to what’s important, we still turn to the big dogs. Twitter, Facebook and blogs don’t supplant mainstream media as the best source of news, they amplify it.
Which is why it’s ever more important to support the media as an institution, despite the power and meaning behind citizen journalism. If we don’t, the next time we want consistent, reliable and trustworthy news, we risk finding a site that has shut down. Ultimately we do need expert content.
It is not the New York Times’ public obligation to put their paywall down. It is the public’s obligation to ensure the paywall stays up.