Paywall's

Publishing over the past decade has shifted dramatically. Modes of publishing are changing from print to digital and online. For myself, most to all of my daily intake of published material happens digitally. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian are the newspapers which I read and I will only ever read them in their printed form if I see one lying around, I will not purchase one, however, I do have a subscription to the Sydney Morning Herald via my iPhone.
This weeks reading seemed to focus around the issues of paywall's and to put it further, the issues of paywall's surrounding the New York Times. 


According to Dan Gillmor and Felix Salmon, the NYT's paywall is friendly, welcoming and much looser then that of the Wall Street Journal where information is completely restricted unless you have a subscription. They argue that this freer platform will encourage people to buy subscriptions and I personally would agree. I purchased my subscription with SMH when a paywall restricted me from reading the article through their application. I knew I could have easily gone through he browser and accessed the same article but I felt an obligation to the content, I view and enjoy the service on a daily basis and it felt right to pay; the process felt like more of a, paying of respect opposed to purchasing of material.
This being said for me as an individual, I have countless friends who would never read a journalistic article, online or printed. In this age it is far easier to access information through platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, twitter and many other forms of social networking. As Alan Rusbridger talks about in his interview, that the industry is shrinking. He states that for sometime now things have been expanding and growing with the digital age but now are shrinking and that journalists must find what they are good at and stick to it, he says, 'It's the Jeff Jarvis haiku, do what you do best and link to the rest'.
This is exactly what social networking and social forum websites do and do perfectly. All of these sites, which generate readers and viewers into the hundreds of millions, never pretend to be what they are not, they are all user generated sites. The content which we view is uploaded by everyday people. Of course this raises another issue, is what were are reading and viewing always factual and from a reliable source, but thats of another concern. In relation to modes of publishing, in the digital age, there is no longer a fixed, or even fail safe, way of getting information across. Information flow is dictated by the users and the forum they choose.