Democracy: ‘Upgrade to Paid’ To Be Informed

“Welcome to ‘Things Worth Remembering: ‘Life Is Real! Life Is Earnest!’ in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart—because once upon a time Americans could pick up their daily newspaper and find a totally straightforward, understandable poem full of advice on how to be a good person,’” the website The Free Press says. 

Its current article was by Ryan Holiday, who was writing about his favorite poems and their insights into the human condition.

Intriguing, we thought.

“Life is mostly froth and bubble,

Two things stand like stone,

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.”

He quotes Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poem “Ye Wearie Wayfarer.”

We were interested in reading more. But like so much other information on the internet today, we were asked to “Upgrade to paid” for further access. For most people, those three words are a dead end to their interest and pursuit of knowledge.

In our representative democracy, an informed citizenry is critical to its future. If citizen knowledge about local government, our schools, and communities becomes one of “Upgrade to paid,” it will be lost. Most people won’t pay the extra price.

“Publishers continually strive to build sustainable revenue models, typically choosing between subscription-first or ad-driven approaches. Decisions often follow prevailing trends, ideology or necessity,” Imtiaz Patel writes for E & P Magazine. E & P stands for Editor and Publisher. 

“Currently, there’s a strong industry sentiment favoring subscription revenue for long-term sustainability,” he writes. But even the news websites we do subscribe to exclude us from their “premium” content without upgrading to another level of access.

That is the future of news. At least it is for the largest dailies and most nationally successful specialty publications. 

It is a world in which small-town community newspapers won’t exist. We don’t have population numbers to generate the revenue needed. We have a population too removed from paying attention to staying informed; too distracted by social media, streaming internet programs, and Netflix shows.

“Newspapers are going to become ever more exclusive,” newspaper consultant Jerry Bellune wrote more than a decade ago. “We must court the upscale market. Upscale buyers will pay for a good product just as they will pay for other luxury items. I’m not preaching elitism. This is reality. Let’s quit trying to be all things to all people. It doesn’t work.”

That doesn’t work for us, but his words were prophetic. As newspapers struggle for financial survival, they’ve put up paywalls. Some offer a base subscription price, but then also provide premium content to those with the funds and interested in upgrading. 

News that lets you know who is running for public office, of increases in your property taxes, of your school district considering going  to a four-day school week, and so much more is going behind a paywall.

The information you need to be an engaged citizen is going away. News that creates a sense of community and shared experience, a shared future in which a sense of common purpose is required, is fading away.

“Those who know the power of information will pay to obtain it, and use that knowledge to influence the agenda,” John Ibbitson of the Toronto Globe and Mail wrote in 2009.  “Those who lack the means or interest will depend on blogs, social networking and whatever information they choose to look for online. How does democracy survive on that?”

His warning has been shrugged off by an indifferent American citizenry as have many other warnings.

We seek information to inform our writing. But we constantly find paywalls. Perhaps the most absurd paywalls we encounter are those erected by newspapers around editorials and columns published with the intention of highlighting the importance of newspapers to their communities. Their paywalls exclude everyone who is not a subscriber from reading about why they should subscribe.

As we were writing this column, we received an email titled “Indiana’s local news desert expands with new cuts.” The story was behind a paywall.

Newspapers were once filled with numerous columnists, thoughtful writers, in a single package. You could subscribe or buy single copies. You could read them in the library or find a copy sitting in a cafe – freely available.

Magazines brought you the arts, literature, and commentary that stimulated thought and reflection. They entertained and enlightened with many stories and columns.

Now it is increasingly as if our sources of gathered awareness and understanding of our society have been shattered, fragmented into individual crumbs of teased stories, columns and podcasts trying to lure us into subscribing to a particular point of view. You would have to subscribe to dozens of these sites to make up for what was lost in the packaged and professionally edited newspapers and magazines.

Our common story is being lost. An increasing number of American citizens are living uninformed, misinformed and trivial information lives. Too many newspapers are owned by corporations producing something devoid of community news pretending to be newspapers.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” Neil Postman wrote in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. It was about what television was doing to us. Imagine what he would say today.

It’s vaudeville act we are getting today. It will get worse. Artificial General Intelligence will “spoon feed” us the “news” that entertains and confirms our prejudices with increasing sophistication. It will enhance the increasingly remote information islands we live on with trivia that entertains and distracts from the meaningful. Local news will be out of sight and out of mind.