There’s a strong likelihood that this post will pander to the lame stereotype of the tight-fisted Scot but hey, I am what I am.Should I feel guilty about the amount of free online content I consume each week / month? I don’t mean blogs of course since they don’t charge for the ‘privilege’ (although perhaps an interesting parlour game on what blogs we’d pay to read if we had to?) but newspapers, magazines and journals etc.
Sating an appetite for political news and comment in pre-internet times was an expensive job. Without any online access and with rather meagre means I was forced either to linger in the newsagents irritating staff and genuine customers by reading as much as I could of the New Statesman or the Economist or, when expulsion from WH Smith’s loomed large, actually buying the things. And such was my appetite that once I’d actually been forced down that ‘buy’ route subscription became the most economical way of doing it. So while my peers waited with bated breath for ‘Q’ or ‘NME’ to land on their doormats it was the prospect of Bagehot or Saki that sustained me each week.
Online access (first at work then at home) changed all this. As far as I know, other than the Scotsman (they’d have to pay me), none of the major UK broadsheets charge for basic access online and the most recent editions of the Economist, the New Statesman and the Spectator are almost entirely free each week. There’s often some sort of subscription option (print or online) that does confer some extra goodies such as archive access or the occasional subscriber-only article but for the main part most of the new content can be seen for free and often before print release.
I think the impulse to guilt is prompted by the fact that I’m obviously on some list of past subscribers - I regularly get post from Boris Johnson trying to solicit a weekly fee for the Spectator’s ‘Champagne for the Brain’ or from the Economist explaining that a subscription to them will leave me ‘better informed’ than my work colleagues (a curious marketing angle that). Needles to say all such pleas find their way to my recycling bin. I like to believe that the likes of the Spectator or the Economist would applaud my market-conscious approach of refusing to pay for that which I can get for nothing and the New Statesman would at least welcome my recycling efforts.
A couple of small flaws though. The excellent Prospect is still largely a subscription / purchase only publication so my spend isn’t entirely eradicated. And now that I can read the Daily Mail free online I’m actually forced to buy toilet paper. No system’s perfect.
Labels: Media
5 Comments:
as the printing press changed the economics of disseminating information through reducing the cost of reproducing it, so has the internet created another quantum economic change.
no reason to feel guilty that you happen to live at the beginning of another "printing press age", if you ask me.
Thank you.
If I even clicked on the odd sidebar ad now & then I might feel less ignoble since I'd at least be contributing to revenue that way!
look at it this way...the information gathered about us through cookies and other forms of tracking are already bringing revenue to their advertiser's merry coffers...so by our very presence we're doing our part.
I read New Statesman , Spec and Prospect, I have a nose in a few blogs and read the Telegraph cover to cover every day. I also annotate each amd file cuttings in my gothic system containing such categories as A- anti Liberal ,S - sleaze and B - Brown`s failings . As you might imgaine there are often items that would fall into various categories.
I stick to this print way of doing things because when you go on line you only find what you are loking for . Look back over a months cuttings and it is amazing how quickly the past is forgotten.
I try to read the odd book as well.
Free online access is everything. I won't pay a penny for information.
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