How To Be Swedish

I’ve been noticing an odd trend here in Sweden lately regarding newspapers and their corresponding websites. You go to some of these sites and click on a headline, and then you’re told that you can’t read that article unless you sign up for a paid membership. And it’s not just some articles on the site, it’s all of them, rendering the website completely useless unless you pay membership to read the news. To be fair I shouldn’t call this a trend. I’ve just noticed it on for the small regional paper that I usually read. But when I asked them about it they said a lot of other newspapers are doing this.

I’ve never heard of this before and I think it sucks. Is this happening other places or just here? To me, that’s not the purpose of the paper’s website, and certainly not the way to monetize it. There’s not nearly as much information or articles on the website everyday as there is in the actual physical newspaper. But yet it costs just as much to subscribe to the site as it does to have the paper home delivered. I can’t imagine people paying for this but I guess some are if they are going to this model. It’s not going to be me though. I read newspaper sites from all over the world everyday and I don’t see Fox News, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, or any of the other major news sources making you pay to read an article. I guess this tiny little newspaper thinks it’s going to be a global trend setter.

I get the reason why they want to do this, obviously newspaper distribution is down thanks to the internet but you can make a lot of money off a website without forcing people to pay just to read it’s content. A website should seek to get as much traffic as it can and then monetize it through advertising, building email lists to promote to, maybe membership fees for special content, there’s a hundred different ways. I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by doing this as they have to be losing a lot of traffic which means the amount they can charge for advertising goes down.

But then again I could be wrong. Maybe this is a sign of the times and all newspapers will end up doing this. But I doubt it. Are any of you noticing this happening in other places? To me this is going too far, like paying a tax just to have a TV in your home, and I’ll stick to the 99.9% of online news sources that are free.