• by Tony Silber , Staff Writer, February 9, 2022

The Austin American-Statesman is bucking an industrywide trend of newspapers charging readers for access to their content, opting instead for free access, with only stories that represent its “best work” remaining behind the paywall.

The announcement came in a letter to readers last week from Editor Manny Garcia. “Starting this week, readers who aren’t yet subscribers will no longer be limited on the number of articles they read in a 30-day period,” Garcia wrote. “Now more than ever before, more people in Austin and Texas will be able to have access to key news and information without limitations — hundreds of stories each month.”

The reason for the shift, Garcia wrote, is that subscriber-only stories have produced far more new subscribers than the metered paywall. “We see a direct line from reading our premium journalism to gaining and retaining subscribers,” he wrote.

I guess that’s the ultimate -- and obvious -- objective. But I note a few contradictions in the approach. The first is publishing's basic business proposition. Content creation costs money, and consumers should expect to pay for it. Those 12 words basically say it all, and the newspaper industry is finally embracing that approach. The Statesman, owned by Gannett and with a daily print circulation of about 130,000, is moving in the other direction.

The major national newspaper brands -- The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal -- do well with subscriptions. But regional papers are still in transition.

Newspapers and virtually all other print media spent 25 years habituating readers to accessing their work online at no cost. This was a catastrophic mistake, driven by the proliferation of free online content and the tech-industry’s mantra that “internet content wants to be free.”

The thinking went like this: More eyeballs create brand value though sharing and expanded reach, which can be monetized via advertising. It was also driven by the wrongheaded implied notion that newspaper content, created by trained and professional journalists, isn’t really differentiated from the flood of online junk, clickbait and plagiarized content.

Meanwhile, monetization through advertising did turn out to work spectacularly well -- but only for Facebook and Google, which to a significant extent make their money on the backs of legacy newspapers’ content.

So now one major newspaper is reverting to free access to stories, with a few exceptions. “Our approach here is twofold,” Garcia wrote. “We want to support the community by providing unlimited access to need-to-know information in both times of crisis and calm. We hope that by bringing you more access to our journalism, you will see the value of our work and join our growing family of subscribers.”

Quality journalism brings value,” Garcia continued. “The Statesman stands for quality.”

So here, restated from the top, is the contradiction. If quality journalism brings value, isn’t it merely stating the obvious that readers should pay for that value -- in all cases? The second contradiction is that the Statesman, in offering two tiers of value, is in effect devaluing the free level. If the paid material represents the “best work,” then how should readers define the rest? And how should the journalists who create the free tier think about that work?