what to think of paywalls ... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Smári McCarthy <[email protected]> Date: 2011/4/26 Subject: [fcf_discussion] Re: slovakias media hides behind paywall To: [email protected] On 04/22/2011 12:47 PM, stef wrote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/apr/19/paywalls-slovakia?INT...

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Nine major news organisations - including three broadsheet newspapers, a tabloid, two magazines and a television station - have banded together to charge a single subscription fee for access to their content.

Launched yesterday, Project Piano will be free for the next two weeks.

But

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after that, users will pay about 87p a week or £2.54 a month to read, view and listen to material provided by some of the country's main news organisations.

The paywall tendency is becoming more common. I can't make up my mind if it's acceptable (short term) or not. Long term it's certainly not a good direction. Either way, this is actually an interesting development, and will probably lead to the creation of a multitude of small outlets catering to less mainstream views that may have been catered to by the "cheap pages" on these more traditional media so far... In France the media outlet MediaPart ( https://www.mediapart.fr/ ) is a fully paywalled web publication. While the paywall itself locks down culture, there is a bright side to the story: The reduced reliance on advertising makes the publication more resilient to external influences. Just a thought, Smári -- Smári McCarthy - International Modern Media Institute [email protected] - +354 662 2701 - http://immi.is/ PGP: B221 6FD2 779A E5B5 9D79 743C D5DC 2A79 C2E4 AE92 ----- +info http://list.fcforum.net/wws/info/fcforum_discussion ---- -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens