Oklahoma State U.’s student newspaper, The Daily O’Collegian, is attempting to do what many major news outlets have failed to do: charge readers for online content.
While initial reactions to this move have been mostly negative, we see a potential revenue source for underfunded university media outlets if this venture proves successful.
The plan is to put up an online pay wall for frequent readers residing 25 miles outside of the Stillwater campus.
Some have argued that this move has the potential to destroy circulation, but let’s be honest: most of The O’Collegian’s readership is probably within that 25 mile radius. The paper’s general manager, Raymond Catalino, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the pay wall would affect less than 25 percent of readers.
The same would likely hold true if The Daily put up a pay wall. Because we serve primarily the OU community, we’re unlikely to have large readership in cities like Woodward, Tulsa or even Oklahoma City.
However, people who do read the paper outside of the Norman bubble probably have a vested interest in the campus, such as alumni, sports fans and prospective students. These are exactly the kind of paying customers Catalino is trying to attract, according to an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Some readers may think the quality of a student newspaper isn’t worth paying for. It’s true that student journalists can have a difficult time covering all the hard-hitting campus news when they have classes and other commitments.
However, we are still the best source for all OU news, and like anything else, we require funding to run. And if you haven’t heard, the state of the news media has been in turmoil in recent years.
Once upon a time, there was no Internet. People had to get their news from television or the physical newspaper.
To get the paper delivered to their homes, people actually had to pay money and subscribe to the publication. After the Internet came along, the old business model shattered. Only papers such as The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times have been able to find success with charging readers because they publish quality articles focused on highly specialized topics.
This brings up another dimension of the future of quality journalism: If fewer media outlets can afford to pay their journalists, quality is going to decline.
We’ve seen this in action today. More than a few newspapers have moved completely online. Layoffs at major outlets have been enormous. This semester, The Daily even decreased the number of papers it prints from 10,500 to 8,000 per day to save on printing costs and help balance the Student Media Department budget.
Like it or not, those in the news industry are going to need help in the near future, and your own campus newspaper is no different.
If The O’Collegian succeeds in charging at least some readers for online content, you can probably expect several university papers to follow suit.
Nobody likes spending money, but doing it for news is mutually beneficial. Journalists don’t starve, and you get quality news.
We wish our fellow journalists at The O’Collegian luck in their pay wall experiment. In the meantime, we hope you support all of your local papers. If you want quality news, someone is going to have to pay.