The Imminent Divide

Earlier this month, I was one of thousands of NYTimes.com readers who visited the site's homepage to learn that the publication would soon be introducing a pay model for its online content. As a devoted reader and fan of The Times, I must conclude that the step toward a pay model was regrettably inevitable, and indicative of not only a large change in the role The Times will play in the world, but also the continuing evolution of journalism in the digital age.

In the business section, The Times reports that the paid online subscription was “in the works for years,” which speaks to its inevitability. The recession of the past few years hit many industries hard, but few were hit as hard as online advertising. Even as the world slowly recovers from the downturn, the now-former system does not seem to be economically sustainable, so it is hard to blame The Times for wanting to make a profit-minded change. With the failure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer fresh in executives’ memories, the cost of doing nothing is clearly too large.

However, it would be a mistake for us to accept this change as unavoidable without at examining the social cost. The Times' online pay model is the beginning of a divide in journalism. On one end, there will be the high-quality, in-depth, comprehensive journalism that The Times has provided for years, and on the other end will be a lower-quality alternative. As readers realize that they must pay for high-quality content, fewer will be willing to do so. As a result, there will be more consumers in the market for low-quality journalism, and so the two varieties will diverge further.

But it is clear that the New York Times Company did its best to mitigate this divide. It avoided the traditional pay wall model employed by other publications such as the Wall Street Journal. Furthermore, the flexibility of The Times model allows it to control the limit of free articles, so that in an emergency that limit might be lifted. Lastly, they embrace social media by allowing access to all content through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These aspects of the model demonstrate The Times' understanding of the potential risks of the pay model, and should be commended.

Despite these efforts, there will still be a limit on journalistic content, and the consequences of this limit and the resulting segmentation in journalism are potentially very serious. The average reader will likely be less informed. Perhaps worse, the poorer reader will likely be less informed. While there might be few differences between the news content on sites like NYTimes.com and other free alternatives, it is clear that these differences will grow as the divide between high and low quality journalism widens. This divide in journalism threatens to create worsen the information gap between the rich and the poor.

On this level, it is socially inefficient to think of the New York Times Company, or any other company that engages in journalism as “just a business.” Whether this move will make business sense remains to be seen (the company's earlier venture with paid online content, TimesSelect, was quickly discontinued after an internal study deemed it unprofitable). However, The Times as a national leader in journalism has a mandate to benefit the public, as a well functioning democracy demands a open press. Therefore, it might be helpful to think of journalism as a type of public good, roughly akin to national defense. It is ineffective when one tries to exclude people from it, and its value isn't diminished when more people consume it.

Considering journalism a public good suggests that it might not best be provided by a profit-seeking entity like a company. For instance, the BBC, a world leader in journalism is run by the British government. Wikipedia, one of the most influential online information providers, operates as a nonprofit. Neither of these are suitable solutions now for The Times, but the evolution of online journalism suggests that these may be the socially optimal solutions of the future.

Malcolm-Wiley T. Floyd ’12, a Crimson Editorial writer, is an economics concentrator in Pforzheimer House.