The First Little Pig Built His Pay Wall Out Of Straw
(Media • Be Afraid)
Wow. I mean it.
Hearst Corp. finally did it today, rolling out the long-threatened bad-ass Houston Chronicle Pay Wall.
Yeah buddy, you can still read most of your chron-generated local news and sports online at chron.com, and continue photo-tracking the elite Houston drunks staggering around local clubs.
But from now on, or so it would appear, if you want the good stuff, you’re going to have to fork out $2-$5 a week, depending on how much soggy newsprint you feel like picking out of the ditch.
And exactly what exclusive content do subscribers get in exchange for the bucks?
Exactly one Rick Casey column on the Texas governor’s race, plus something labeled “Mexico” and bearing the headline “When hunters become hunted.”
Is that awesome or what?
In truth, this is so sad that it saps me of the will to pursue my natural inclination toward aiming numerous fat paragraphs of cruel and sarcastic satire at chron management. Almost.
In truth, Hearst has laid off so many journalists that they don’t have enough bricks left to build a pair of paperweights, let alone a paywall.
Although I would be remiss if I didn’t note that a few weeks back, chron fortified their collection of neighborhood “news” reports, by redesigning them as individual blogs under the heading “Ultimate” – not a bad move in at least a couple of ways. For one, they’re finally taking advantage of their sports data, providing local high school football coverage that few if any of their local news competitors provide.
On the other hand, chron has turned the keys over to the public in some portions of these sites, but they’ve apparently laid off too many people to afford a babysitter. At Ultimate Fort Bend and Ultimate Pearland, for instance, “Your News” has consisted for the past few days of lots of posts containing dozens of affiliate hot-links to hotels and tourist destinations all around the world – nice work for a spammer if he can get it. At Ultimate Katy, someone named “cephalexinmg” wants “to tall you about this cephalexin 500mg . my second post will be about this.”
But I digress. As for the far less-than-half-baked pay wall strategy on chron’s part, I find myself simply baffled. Adult business people all got together in a conference room and came to a consensus that this would produce desirable results?
In the meantime, I continue to hone my little recipe for obtaining a full measure of online Houston, national and world news without benefit of any Hearst product whatsoever. Feel free to give it a spin.
→ B.Dunn, Nov 22, 2009, 08 20 am
