The Economist takes a seriously in depth look at the new media revolution in a survey this week.
I’ll admit I’m still reading my way through it, it’s been a busy weekend. But one thing that did strike me in the article entitled "Compose Yourself" was that the survey noted the need for successful publications in the online world to have free access to their content. First among the commentators was – who else? – Mr Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine:
The first step, says Mr Jarvis, is to tear down any walls around the
website. Nowadays “it’s not content until it’s linked,” he says, and
bloggers will not link to articles that require logins and
subscriptions to be viewed. This has immediately obvious effects (see
chart 2). The sites that bloggers link to most are the online New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, USA Today and the BBC.
These are free or mostly free sites and thus, in effect, part of “the”
conversation, because they are already part of a great many
conversations.
It goes on to say that media analysts Jupiter also think it’s good idea:
Free access and permanent links are two specific examples of a new
“story-centric” approach that Jupiter Research, an internet
consultancy, advises newspaper companies to adopt for their web
editions.
A bit of physician heal thyself here.
The article is one of three in the new media survey that you must have a subscription in order to be able to view.
Is that defiance,or just the Economist‘s famed dead-pan irony at play?
I expect that free access is one of the things that will be high on the agenda of new editor John Micklethwait, who acknowledged that new media was a "hurricane" that would hit his business hard (see previous post on Open).
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