★ Journalism as it Used to Be via Paul Carr

Paul Carr writing for TechCrunch on the subject of paywalls:

In fact it wasn’t until the piece was published, this past Sunday, that the significance of the paywall really hit me. For the first time in my career, a piece I’d written for a major newspaper was unavailable to the majority of Internet users. I couldn’t easily link to it from my blog and was forced instead to come up with a kludgy solution which involved making a screen grab of the first two paragraphs, pasting it on my blog and then linking to what would – for most visitors – be a dead end.

All of this, of course, is still way better than pre-Internet writers had it. Before the web, columnists’ opinions were about as permanent and shareable as fish wrapping. Unless a writer was high profile enough to have their words collected into a book, the only way for future readers to discover columns was to visit a library and pore over microfilm.

Amidst all of this chatter about paywalls and shareable content, I had forgotten that merely a decade ago, the thought of reading something days or weeks later was much more difficult without browsing through a dewy decimal system in your library or going through pages and pages of newspaper prints hoping to find the story you needed. The database of words was only organized and catalogued by more words that needed to be read aloud and there was no search function.

I’m still against paywalls that cost $450 a year (NYTIMES) but I can say that we’ve only had archives and Google and “profiles” to find words we wrote last year from a decade. The fact that I can look up tweets and posts that I crapped out 18 months ago is pretty amazing and a luxury that we have only started to get used to.

Maybe this paywall thing isn’t so bad?

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