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objectimpermanence t1_izgy9ji wrote

Reply to comment by kekelakes in Thieves walk out of Downtown Jersey City Best Buy with $20K in Apple products by imaluckyduckie

The money that newspapers need to pay their staff doesn’t appear out of thin air.

Local papers are closing left and right around the country largely due to dwindling ad and subscription revenues.

If paywalls help newspapers stay in business, then it follows that they indirectly help keep people employed at newspapers, no?

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pixel_of_moral_decay t1_izjff5c wrote

It’s really the only one left in the area now that’s not just a website operated by politicians PAC’s.

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kekelakes t1_izhdlmf wrote

I can see your point but The money that supports a publisher and staff largely comes from advertisers (as it has from the beginning of media) and brand partnerships (sponsored posts)….

Paywalls are something media outlets are doing because they all want to do the same thing. If they don’t, think think they are leaving money on the table but unless the content is very very very exclusive, readers just turn elsewhere which results in less clicks which leads to less advertisers in the long run.

All in all supporting local news is always a good thing I can see both sides but as far as local news goes, it probably does more harm than good especially when people want to read about a crime or emergency like in this case. I don’t think the wall appeared until the end in this case though

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objectimpermanence t1_izhg61k wrote

I see what you mean. I just think it’s weird that so many people expect the news to be free while also using ad-blockers, but then they also presumably expect the same level of quality and breadth of coverage that we had back when everyone used to pay for newspapers (in addition to paying for things like classified ads, etc).

The money has to come from somewhere. It’s not like newspapers of today are wildly profitable to begin with, so I can understand why they think they need to have paywalls to meet their profitability targets.

Would be interesting to see if there are any serious studies on whether paywalls are a net negative in the long run.

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