Imagine a State High student trying to find information from a newspaper website. They scour databases and articles for a source, then finally, they find the information they need, but out of nowhere, a newspaper paywall pops up, and the information they searched for has been blocked by the website until they subscribe to the paper. It’s irritating and inconvenient to deal with these types of situations, which prompts the question: do the benefits of newspaper paypalls outweigh the consequences?
First of all, newspaper paywalls are how the newspapers profit. They need a way for people to buy their subscriptions and merchandise. However, it is irritating to search for an article, but find a paywall instead. The frequency of paywalls and the length of an article they block depend on the website and its popularity.
“It’s typically ones that are more well-established; they have a little bit more credibility to them,” Jared McConkey, a ninth-grade English teacher, said.
Thus, more prominent websites implement paywalls because they attract a larger audience. Other papers are lesser known, but still have them. This trend results in more credible sources being blocked. Paywalls also come in different variants. Occasionally, they will blur out the whole article, making it impossible to read. Other times, they will blur out the end, so one can’t finish the article. This makes it hard to find trustworthy information while researching a topic or reading about a current event, which makes life as a State High student harder.
It typically happens randomly for many articles. They don’t favor click amounts for articles; they just put up paywalls. This makes all viewers get a paywall at some point in time, even if they only look at the lesser-viewed articles. This allows newspapers to make more money in the long run, because if an article becomes famous overnight, it will have paywalls, giving the company more money, inspiring more companies to want to pay that news source.
“I don’t think they filter it by clickage or usage,” McConkey added.
Additionally, there is usually an X to click to close the ad; however, it can still be annoying to have to wait a few seconds just to view an article.
Mark Morath, a State High Librarian, highlighted the frustration expressed by many when it comes to different styles of newspaper paywalls. For Morath, he felt it as though the practice served as a means to generate traffic to the website rather than facilitating access to information.
“They dangle enough information in front of you where you really want to read this critical chunk, and then it’s going to require you to have a full subscription,” Morath said.
Newspapers like giving you enough information to get a sense of what is going on, but then they take it away before you can get a sense of completion.
This shows that some paywalls are different than others, some are in the form of ads, and some are in the form of blurring out some of the article. This just shifts where the money could be going, depending on whether you buy the product. This can be annoying, but the ads typically aren’t as bad as the blurring, because that wants you to subscribe to the paper. Both are hard to do from a school Chromebook.
Morath added more about social media and the effects that it has on the news.
“In today’s age, we consume so much information through our social media accounts,” Morath said.
Social media is a quick way to access information, and many people have social media accounts, whether they want to communicate with friends or share information. Sometimes, however, information on social media is wrong, and it leads us to believe something happened when it truly didn’t. This makes online newspapers more worthwhile, because they are generally more trustworthy than a social media account. Sometimes, people decide that something might have happened, whether it is true or not. Later, he added more about how social media jumps to conclusions to get more views. This can affect how students do in school, because if you look at social media, you have no idea if it is right or not.
Even though paying to read articles and subscribing to newspapers allows the newspaper to profit, all in all, newspaper paywalls are incredibly annoying to deal with, especially for students looking to research for a graded assignment. Even though one can close the pop-up, oftentimes one can’t because of payment requirements, leaving the reader with the unsatisfying feeling of incompletion of the article and limited ways of getting reliable information.
