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# The Content Paywall Ostriches
- URL: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2009/11/the_content_paywall_ostriches/
- Published: 2009-11-30T17:13:43.000Z
- Updated: 2015-04-08T14:41:49.000Z
- Author: Adam Tinworth
- Tags: Journalism, monetisation, news, paywalls, Publishing

To dismiss the whole of the free-to-air reporting, analysis and  
news-gathering being done on blogs and the myriad forms of social media  
that exist in that one paragraph is to duck the crucial question of  
“what do you offer that’s so much more compelling than the work done on  
free content”. Worse than that, it shows a worrying ignorance of the  
material and work that is being done by the amateur and the  
entrepreneurial professional in the field of online journalism.  
Research is meant to be a crucial part of journalism, and it had better  
be part of any business plan. There’s no research here, just prejudice  
and, I suspect, fear.

He also makes the normal spurious pleas to democratic nobility –  
through some sort of reporting elite, ironically – that are trotted out  
again and again. And I think to myself “I’ve seem more genuine holding  
of local politicians to account by [local](http://853blog.wordpress.com/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) [bloggers](http://www.boriswatch.co.uk/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) in south-east London than I have by [the local newspaper](http://www.southlondonpress.co.uk/tn/index.cfm?ref=onemanandhisblog.com)“.

Even Johnston Press admits [it’s just testing the water here](http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/536732.php?ref=onemanandhisblog.com). It’s going to take more than a paywall to save us from the shifts in the information ecology around us.

**Update**: A few minutes after I posted, [I saw this](http://onionbagblog.com/2009/11/30/who-what-where-why-bother/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com). May I suggest that it’s just further evidence of the disconnect between the perceived value of the local press and the often tawdry reality?