An Alarming Number of Newspapers Have Their Articles Behind Paywalls.

Does anyone actually care?

Lately I’ve been watching Seinfeld and one thing I noticed during this revisit is how seriously everyone takes being able to read the paper. One such episode is “The Letter” where you may remember Elaine refuses to take off her Orioles ball cap in the owner’s box at Yankee Stadium, a game she went to by blowing off a work obligation and lying to her boss about it. Nevertheless, her picture ends up in the sports section of The New York Times anyway, so she goes to great lengths to make sure her boss doesn’t see her image in the paper.

Jerry: “They should make the whole plane out of the black box hurr-hurr. ALso I’m dating a 16-year old and everyone’s ok with this for some reason.”

Of course, in a pre-Internet world, that makes sense, even though there was television back then. If you wanted analysis at your own pace, the newspaper was certainly the way to go, despite the fact that it was yesterday’s news. The world must have just moved more slowly back then — if you wanted “breaking news” you’d have to flip on the TV. And if your picture ended up in the paper on a day you called out of work, you could almost guarantee your boss would see it. Fast forward twenty-five years and if your picture ended up in the sports section I’d be willing to bet almost no one you know would even realize. Would you even realize? Would you even care?

When I think of people reading the newspaper as the dominant medium, I think about pre-Vietnam America, i.e. before color television, which makes it even funnier to me to see people in 1996 (30ish years later) still taking reading the paper that seriously, even if the Internet was only in its infant stages.

If you type “newspaper death” into this site’s stock image database, this is the eleventh photo that comes up. Maybe if the newspapers showed more gooch and dong like this image we’d all be flipping through The Washington Post like it was a juicy romance novel instead of “stuff to wrap picture frames in when I’m moving but otherwise going in the trash/oops I left it out in the rain and now I don’t want to touch it so I’ll just leave it there.” Oh wait we have Pornhub and Onlyfans for that. Well, looks like you guys were late on that one too.

People have been calling for the death of newspapers since the dawn of the television, and certainly were writing eulogies for them by the time the Internet rolled its way onto the scene. “The newspaper is now obsolete,” they would say. “I can get all my news, right here. And in real time. And it doesn’t even waste paper.” The Internet would go on to become so powerful that it could sway presidential election votes. You can order just about anything from anywhere thanks to the Internet. During a global pandemic, millions of people could still go to work, all thanks to the Internet. The Internet became so powerful that it killed newspapers, and basically television too, and apparently even our unhealthy and unsustainable obsession with cars and the subsequent commute can be cured by the Internet.

Maybe instead of writing stories, the Washington Post can start an app where it’s like tinder but they actually lean into the hook-up instead of doing that annoying thing where they try to take the moral high ground like all these new apps keep trying to do. like maybe they have one that’s called like “WaPo XOXO” and their marketing is like “tinder but 25% more ass and titties.” sounds like a multimillion dollar idea right there. maybe the Washington Post can focus more on that instead of writing editorials “playing devils advocate” for blue lives matter

And yet at 5 a.m. this morning, in 2021, during the Gilded Age of the Internet, here’s my local newspaper delivery guy throwing newspapers on damn near every doorstep on my street.

Someone has to be reading them…right?

☾

☾

☾

Apparently not, you must be thinking to yourself, or else why would you be writing this? Everything you’ve stated up to this point has led me to believe that you’re going to take “the newspaper industry” down a notch. Oh gee I can’t wait. Time for these Fat Cats at Associated Press and Reuters to get what’s coming to them /eyeroll. You’ll probably make fun of the fact that newspapers were so late to adapt to a changing world and now have to resort to not just advertisements on their websites, but paid subscriptions to read an article nobody fucking cares about, with information that can be found for free anywhere else. It’s a failing model for something that doesn’t offer anything but passive engagement. Like I’m going to sit here and read “facts,” “cogent analysis,” and “complete sentences” about last night’s Yankees-Orioles game when I can just look up the box score on my phone in five seconds, and even see the highlights and shit too. Besides, most people get their news from Facebook anyway. No one cares about the truth, people just want to be right. And I bet there will be some disingenuous “reminiscing” on how one single newspaper could monopolize reality for an entire city less than one-hundred years ago, and how the sad-sack editors at the Atlanta Journal-Constitutions of the world would give their left nut to have that kind of power again. Everything’s always about power. Just get on with it already.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Keep reading HAL MONITOR by creating a free account or logging in.

Support independent journalism. See subscription options.