SF Chronicle said to demolish paywall after four months

The newspaper introduced a new subscription-only Web site in March that charged for access to "premium" stories and columns. But its content is reportedly free now.

A little more than four months after the San Francisco Chronicle began charging online readers for some content, the newspaper's paywall experiment has reportedly come to an end.

The newspaper announced in March that it would place certain "premium" stories and columns behind a paywall, charging readers a $12 monthly subscription fee for access to all the digital content on SFChronicle.com, which is separate from the newspaper's free SFGate.com. News of the paywall's impending collapse was broken Tuesday morning on Twitter by The Verge's Casey Newton, a former reporter at CNET and the Chronicle: ...

The problem is most newspapers are nothing more than cut and paste articles supplied from other newspapers through AP. Other than the Wall Street Journal and a few other big papers (including, unfortunately, the NY Times and Washington Post) very little original reporting is done by any single newspaper. Therefore when a paper puts up a paywall, their potential customers can just go to any of a hundred other newspaper sites publishing the same story.

They will either have to form a unified cartel or start producing enough original, useful material like the WSJ to make it worth paying for.

Paywall up, paywall down. Paywall up, paywall down. These are just more convulsions of the dying newspaper corpses.

The Internet comet crashed to earth in 1998 and killed the newspaper dinosaurs, who existed solely because they could create monopoly conditions for local advertising. The newspapers were killed by the digital revolution with the formation of craigslist, ebay, google, and amazon all around 1998, but their death has taken over a decade to register with their pea-sized brains as their mammoth bodies thrashed about.

Going digital ten years too late means that newspapers have merely become little more than a few additional websites competing with a billion existing web sites for limited advertising dollars. And even worse for the dying papers, ad pages no long bring in thousands of dollars per page, but instead bring in thousandths of a cent per page, so there’s no chance whatsoever of digital ad revenues ever equaling newspaper publishing ad revenues.

Digital subscriptions, also known as paywalls, never had a chance of working either. Most of what’s behind a paywall is freely available elsewhere, and paywalls render any ads behind the paywalls valueless, meaning no one in their right mind is going to pay for an ad behind a paywall.

It is true that the loss of news gathering by newspapers is collateral damage from the digital revolution. However, news was never anything more than the hook to get consumers to buy and read the newspaper ads, and for the most part had been turned into little more than leftest propaganda anyway, so the value of the “loss” is highly debatable.

At any rate, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch, since most newspapers have been promoting the overthrow of all that is good and unique about the U.S. for at least 70 years. At least buggy whip makers never tried to destroy the U.S.

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