Are paywalls the newspaper industry's salvation?

Ever more newspapers establish paywalls in order to get money out of netizens who happen to check for latest news. To be fair, when Rupert Murdoch started this craze (at the London Times), there was much mockery around, people promising to abandon the site etc etc. Murdoch started charging, of course, many years ago. Since then many newspapers who mocked him for his approach ('you are going from millions of visitors access your website to a few thousand or hundred thousand') are copying him. The thing is, while the newspaper is now read by significantly less people than it was prior to the paywall going up, the paywall is generating more money than the digital ads ever managed to.

Since then man other newspapers have begun doing the same. The Globe and Mail in Canada, The Telegraph in Britain, The Age in Australia are just a few examples for this emerging trend. Many more are following them as I write this. Usually you get a limited number of articles that you may read without paying for access, but then you've got to pay if you want more. Currently there is an easy way around paying. You simply clean your browser history (ie eliminate 'cookies') and you are back to zero as far as the article count is concerned. Realistically, however, some computer wiz employed by the newspapers will stop this subversive behaviour. And frankly, so they should.

Obviously, it is not unreasonable for newspapers to charge for what they deliver. There's a difference between investigative journalism produced by the New York Times and opinion journalism delivered free of charge by the Huffington Post. The problem I foresee, however, is that most people, when deciding to pay for access to a news website, will probably go for the best quality news outlet out there. Accordingly, the New York Times is rapidly racking up on-line subscribers. I cannot imagine the same would occur with regard to papers not delivering the same level of quality. To give you a good example of this: The New York Times has a habit of firing known plagiarists. Compare that to a Toronto based daily paper where a known plagiarist is still in full employ. If you had to decide where to spend your hard earned cash, would you swipe your credit card at the New York Times with its still impeccable standards or an alternative such as the Toronto paper. It seems to be a no-brainer to me. You might grab the few locally relevant pieces from the Toronto paper, but for in-depth journalism you'd spend your money at the New York Times or papers like it (and there are very few).

The other problem for the unnamed Toronto newspaper (and its equivalents in Britain, Down Under, Berlin, and wherever else), is that they are under-resourced, and it is widely known that they are under-resourced. Why would you want to spend your money to access the website of a newspaper that you now already isn't on top of its game due to a lack of journalistic resources?

To me, that seems to be the next problem in the paywall revolution. Many mainstream national newspapers, I suspect, will be going down, because they don't deliver the quality required to stay in the game any longer. Funnily, niche players such as the German taz newspaper (an unorthodox leftish daily paper) might have a decent shot at survival, because they have a dedicated audience not interested in reading only what the New York Times has on offer.

Either way, the paywall revolution might well be the last hurrah of many mainstay newspapers before they disappear altogether. We all will be worse off for it, I suspect. Will this regret make me subscribe to the plagiarist-employing Toronto paper. Who am I kidding?

and a late comer to the Open Access Party ... the New York Times

Just about every outlet in the universe has written about the pitfalls of Open Access digital only 'academic publishing'. Today the New York Times joined the party. It's not a bad piece actually, written by veteran health reporter Gina Kolata. Check it out when you have a minute! It's centered around Beall's list of predatory on-line 'publishers'. What's lacking are reasonable explanations of what made this fiasco possible. Low barriers to market entry anyone?

Meanwhile ever more research funders are rushing headlong into forcing researchers they fund to publish their content in open access outlets. All of this, of course, is giving rise to ever more dodgy 'publishers' opening up their business, aka uploading submitted content to their webserver for a steep fee. Worse, upcoming research assessment exercises force academics in some places to publish their research outputs in open access outfits without providing funding for the uploading activity (aka open access publishing). You better forget about the idea of having reliable publishing histories attached to academic content. Courtesy of Open Access the powers that are have fully embraced a wild west version of what was once known as academic publishing. It'll no doubt come to bite them in their backside, but I suspect those responsible will long have left when the consequences of these ill-considered policies hit the proverbial fan.

Excited About Nudging?

A reasonably recent fad in public health is the idea of nudging folks to do the right - ie healthy - thing. The idea is basically that you incentivize people to live healthy. Whether such a strategy can work over time probably depends on a whole range of factors, so I'm not here to pass judgment on 'nudging' as such.

What annoys me is lousy reporting (and arguably pointless social science research) in the service of the nudging agenda. The New York Times, one of my preferred daily reads, recently reported about a study involving Mexican gay men at high risk for HIV infection.

The Times tweeted the findings of this study like this, 'Gay Men in Mexico City Would Stay HIV Free for $288, Study Shows'. The study, of course, found nothing of that sort! And that is what annoys me. 

All that the eager social scientists discovered was that gay men they interviewed in Mexico City said they would 'pledge to stay H.I.V.-free, attend a monthly safe-sex talk and take regular H.I.V. tests to prove they were uninfected — all in return for just $288 a year.' That is a far cry from actually staying HIV negative, as the Times tweet misleadingly summarizes. 

Imagine the excitement of our public health people! It costs about 8000 $ to treat HIV-infected folks per year, so getting that deal at 288 $  per year is a bargain, isn't it? 

 Well, what's the catch then: For starters, just because people promise to stay HIV negative doesn't mean they actually will stay HIV negative. Surely living a healthy life instead of going on life-preserving chemotherapy is a better incentive than 288 $ per year! The thing about safe sex is that it requires a tad bit more to succeed than 288$ per year, something that seems to have escaped our social science nudgers. It doesn't seem terribly sensible to base any public policy in this context on such research. It might be possible to get people to test more frequently for HIV, and to pop more frequently into clinics, but it seems far fetched to suggest that a measly 288$ per years would impact greatly on actual sexual behaviours. Answers to hypothetical questions with $$ signs attached to them don't quite cut it, at least in my view. It's one thing to say the right thing in response to a hypothetical question, it's quite another to actually live up to what one's answer suggests one would do if it came to the crunch.

Death penalty again

I have always been 'against' capital punishment.

My main reasons had to do with the view that killing people against their express wishes is barbaric, as well as with the fact that once a wrongly sentenced person has been killed, no subsequently discovered mistakes can possibly be rectified as the innocently executed person cannot be brought back to life. I was also always concerned that in the USA at least the distribution of death penalty suggests a legal system that is fundamentally unjust. Those most likely to get handed down a capital punishment verdict happen to belong to ethnic minority groups, and they happen to be poor. Rich murderers such as OJ Simpson on the other hand are able to buy themselves out of such verdicts by means of deploying legal teams capable of getting them off the hook.

Last but by no means least I considered the argument from the deterrent effect of capital punishment unconvincing, mostly because there had been no empirical evidence actually supporting this argument. This last reason is a truly important matter. If it can be shown that the existence of capital punishment incontrovertibly reduces the number of murders of innocent people one would at least have one powerful reason to reconsider this kind of punishment. It would then not seem any longer to be the case that a slam-dunk type case against the death penalty exists. One could still consider it barbaric, of course, and one could (one should!) have serious concerns about erroneous judgments, but these sorts of costs could well be outweighed by lives otherwise preserved thanks to the deterrent effect.

Well, you might want to review this particular issue. The New York Times today analyses recent empirical evidence and concludes that there is reasonably strong evidence supporting the claim that there is a deterrent effect. Even if you still think that capital punishment is an unconditional 'no no', you might want to reconsider your reasons for holding this view in light of the research reviewed in the NYT.