Chicago Sun-Times Kills Its Paywall; Makes Its Content Free For Everyone
Going back many, many years, we've argued that paywalls are not a particularly sustainable model for most journalism enterprises. There are some exceptions. They seem to work in cases where breaking news and timely access are extremely important (e.g., financial news), and in cases where there is a strong community built up around the news provider (both small and large). A few months back I did a fun podcast discussion looking at why I was wrong when I predicted the NY Times paywall would fail. It's worth listening to the whole thing, but the crux of it was that I didn't expect the NY Times to be able to build up the kind of communal support that it eventually did - whereby many people felt that, in the age of Donald Trump, they had to be supporting media organizations like the Times.
But, still, I strongly believe that most general interest news orgs will find a paywall does not work and it actually harms the journalism the news organization is attempting to do. Over the years, we've seen various news organizations that gleefully put up a paywall back down and admit defeat as they removed the paywall, often noting how few readers actually paid, and how it actually tended to boost competitors without paywalls.
The latest to do so is the Chicago Sun-Times, which has announced that it has now dropped its paywall. What's most interesting to me is that the newspaper seems almost joyous about this decision in its announcement, recognizing it can better serve the people of Chicago this way.
As a reader of the Chicago Sun-Times, you turn to us for the news you need to thrive. For timely, accurate and fairly reported stories on the issues that matter most. For stories that celebrate and honor the members of our community, from victories on the field to remembrances of lives well lived. Our journalists care about your community because it's our community, too. And we strongly believe that everyone in the Chicago area should have access to the news, features and investigations we produce, regardless of their ability to pay.
So today, we are dropping our paywall and making it possible for anyone to read our website for free by providing nothing more than an email address. Instead of a paywall, we are launching a donation-based digital membership program that will allow readers to pay what they can to help us deliver the news you rely on.
It's a bold move: Reporting the news is expensive, and the converging market forces of inflation and an anticipated (or possibly already here) recession could further endanger local newsrooms like ours. But we know it's the right thing to do.
For the Sun-Times' next chapter to be successful, it is essential for us to be truly open and inclusive so we can tell the stories that matter to all parts of our community. A membership program connects our revenue model more closely to how well we serve our community, holding us accountable to you, our readers. We think that's a good thing, because if we're not serving you, we're not doing our jobs. So we're taking a leap of faith and putting our trust in you.
This is a really open and honest announcement, noting that it still does need the support of readers to survive, but rather than beating people over the head with a paywall, and basically treating people who want to see the news as potential thieves, the Sun-Times is being open, and honest, and treating its community with respect. Hopefully it works out better than the paywall approach. It would be great to see more news organizations realize that locking up all your content is often a path to irrelevance.