Behind the great (PAY)WALL

Here's an idea: Compound interest is the eight wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn't understand it, pays it.

 Here's another idea: Read every day. That's how knowledge builds up, like compound interest. 

 Here's a fact: Social media and our addiction to instant gratification has reduced our attention spans to less than a goldfish and is making us impatient, unpleasant and dumber everyday. 

 Connecting these facts and ideas together, I decided to start a newsletter. The simple aim is to make you and me a little smarter, a little more aware than the day before. Together. The below article is an excerpt from one of the newsletters I send to my subscribers every Sunday. You can subscribe and read the rest of these newsletters in the archive section here - reallyonlyharmessaboutnothing.

If you have recently taken the pain of opening up any news channel at any point of time during the day, chances are that you'd be disappointed by the constant drama being played out 24x7. Over the past few years I have (and I believe some of you may agree with me) observed a steady decline in the quality of news broadcast in India. Ever since TRPs started governing the advertisement revenues, which in-turn determined the success of a news channel, journalism has taken a backseat. And here as well Rome was not destroyed in a single day. Things started with the coverage on 26-11 attacks in Mumbai, when Indian media in their enthusiasm became an unwitting accomplice in aiding the terrorists' handlers stationed far away to guide them and prolong the battle. To a point today when prime-time media is filled with either celebrity toddlers, chest-thumping stories of Rafael planes (being delivered after almost 8 years of entering into the deal), or discussing an unfortunate incident of suicide peppered with a nationwide witch-hunt. And this is happening at a time when we are in the midst of a global pandemic, with one of the worst-affected economies globally and things set to become worse as we are on track to become the country with the highest number of COVID-19 cases. Things have gotten so bad that the term "media trials" even get featured in court judgments.

Amidst all this, I came across Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy's - arguably India's premier legal policy think tank - recent report, ambitiously titled "The Future of News in India: Sustaining Credibility in an Age of Digital Transformation". The focus of the report was on softer targets like evolution of print news in the internet era and digital news media, and did not focus on the more problematic high-pitched television news which has a considerable reach today. It's not your average Sunday reading, but the 70-pager report does make for one compelling read.  

While reading through this report, I was reminded of a REALLY annoying thing that I keep coming across while reading online - PAYWALLS. Its quite ironic to bring this up now, considering ONLY last week I wrote on how Wikipedia is still steadfast in being totally and utterly free ("utterly free" here meaning even no advertisements, even in the face of corporate media) in a world constantly ruled by money and profits. But before delving into paywalls, I think its important we reexamine our attitudes towards it.

Go back thirty years, when the only source of news were newspapers or the propaganda-laced Doordarshan. People never bothered paying for receiving news through these mediums because this cost was, to an extent, invisible - the TV connection bills and newspaper vendor only came once a month and charged a bare minimum amount for it. Soon after when television news started coming along with hundreds of other channels, all part of an inclusive package by cable TV companies and later on satellite TV companies. We started seeing news in a different light - one that's a free resource. Similarly, the internet also changed our attitudes - it was another free resource (the monthly broadband charges were another example of 'invisible negligible charges' like the newspaper bill) and we began to start consuming content for free - here came Napster and PirateBay. 

Slowly companies realized this, changed their business models and started using data as a resource, something that can be bought and sold. Soon we realized that these apparently 'free' resources came at a steep cost - our privacy. After a brief tussle in the war over privacy versus the web (in which the web obviously won), companies then started enticing people with quality content for a premium cost. This led to another shift in our attitudes, and today we no longer mind paying for Amazon Prime, Netflix or Hotstar. But there's a problem with this change in our attitude - somehow it did not extend to how we consume news. Somewhere between the last 30 years, we got accustomed to receiving news for free (advertisement revenue, paid news, user data, TRPs being the 'hidden costs' here). To a point today when we get annoyed if someone wants to charge us money for it.

Today if you go to any reputed news website, some Indian or mostly any global site, chances are that a major portion of the content on these websites would be behind a paywall. Till not long ago when I was a student I used to HARMLESSly circumvent these paywalls - often by using friends' laptops and phones to read articles on them (most websites like New Yorker, Economist allow a particular limit per month). Only now I have started paying for the news I consume. Vidhi's report also touches upon the economic necessity of a paywall for people who used to be like me: "this model has serious implications on the access to news for readers. This is enhanced in the context of the Internet where there is a general unwillingness to pay for content, combined with the inability of a large section of the population to afford paywalls."

But the report glosses over one crucial fact - how do you justify a world when the truth is paywalled but the lies are free(long read). Paywalls are an economic necessity despite being an annoyance, but when you have lies floating out there at a much faster rate than what quality journalism can match - a paywall reduces its reach even further. The Cambridge Analytica scam showed how fake news had a great role in giving Trump the US Presidency, and the landmark Wall Street Journal article on Facebook's role with the ruling party in India - only highlights how tricky the online world is when it comes to news vs. fake news. 

India is unique in these aspects. We have a boomer generation which has a great appetite for passive consumption of online media, mostly through mediums with minimal interaction like whatsapp (than twitter or facebook which demands greater data usage and user engagement). This has given such a breathtaking pace to the spread of fake news in India that riots can be incited over a single post, and even coined a phenomena called "whatsapp university." The pace of fact-checking and quality journalism is NOTHING compared to the speed with which fake news can spread in India. As a result paywalls work even lesser in India than elsewhere.

And it's not just me who finds this debate important. The New Yorker recently wrote ABOUT it as well. Facebook and Google are almost in a public war with media companies in Australia on paying for news they freely publish on their websites. On one side of the hedge, you have The Ken - a great subscription-only business news service - which congratulates itself in almost every email or article they write that how they continue to remain a fully paid news service as a justification for the quality content they produce. My questions to their editorial team on these lines went unanswered (and justifiably so). On the other side you have major websites like Guardian, which pride itself on being free, and carry a solemn reminder of this fact at the end of every article they write.Going behind a paywall comes at a cost - to the reader, as well as the writer - but eventually the greatest price may end up being paid by the society.