Like anyone who’s interested in business news, we love the Financial Times — but it’s difficult to show other people why we love it when the newspaper erects paywalls everywhere you click.
Newspapers need paying readers, no doubt about it. But every article and every blog post? That’s rough going.
(”Check this out!” we say to a friend, e-mailing a link. “Paywall,” they respond, unable to read it.)
The FT recently backed down a bit on that strategy. The articles are still all behind the wall, unfortunately, but its blogs — Money Supply, among others — have been released from the keep to enjoy freedom much like its Alphaville blog long has.
It’s an ongoing struggle as the FT figures out how to survive online.
Reuters‘ man-about-town Felix Salmon writes:
So long as the news side rather than the blog side is the part of the business which is bringing in subscription revenue, the FT will overvalue the news side and undervalue the blog side — no matter how important or valuable the journalism produced by the blog side. The result is bloggers who feel underappreciated, and who get the clear message that they should move over to the less web-native news side if they want to climb the FT career ladder.
Can good, worldly business journalism be done without a paywall online? I don’t know.
The FT backs down on paywalled blogs [Reuters]
