SpaceNews goes hard-core paywall
As of July 1st, all articles are behind a paywall. This includes all historical articles (going back decades, apparently), including any and all InternetArchive copies -- so RIP every Wikipedia link that has ever referenced them as a source. A free-registration option gets you access to 3 articles per month. A proper subscription is $230/year.
A freelance journalist who has been published with them in the past had this to say about it, which I thought was enlightening and, well, thoughtful.
On SpaceNews going paywalled, and the broader disregard for archiving in journalism.
I reviewed his stuff a bit, and I like his writing, so I added his RSS link to my feed (while simultaneously deleting my SpaceNews link), and on a whim--because he has his email right there on his "About" page, I emailed him to tell him that I liked his article and I just replaced SpaceNews with him.
Like, an hour later, I received a response from him, reminding me that he focuses primarily on the Moon, and that he loves RSS and is happy to hear people still use it.
And it was so refreshing to connect--almost directly--with an actual human being writing news.
Just thought I'd share.
Oh, I also want to comment on that price ... $230/year is--IMHO--wildly overpriced. But almost immediately, it also occurred to me that they probably lost more readership going from $0/year to $1/year, than going from $1 to $230 so, you know, business-wise, I suppose it's not exactly a horrible decision.
But I'd like to hear other people's opinions on that price, too.
How do Internet Archive copies get retroactively paywalled?
If you are the domain owner you can email them and have archives of your domains removed, and use a special text file in your web directory that instructed crawlers what they can and can't access.
The archives weren't paywalled, they were either removed at the request of the site, or never created because their crawlers instruction disallow the archives crawler bot.
Ah got it, I misunderstood the post
It's a tough problem. Good content and services cost money. I pay for NYT, and have a monthly donation for NPR and Propublica. I'm simply not going to pay for more online news content. I'd have to be really into a niche to pay as much for their articles as I pay for the NYT.
But those sites need funds as much as anyone, and local newspapers are struggling with the same problem leading to a lack of local journalism outside of large metro areas.
That’s just how demand for niche products is. The reality is that 90% of their audience would not pay any amount over $0, and 10% are diehards that would happily pay over $20/month. So when ad revenue dries up, it’s priced as a product with inelastic demand.
That's a good way to characterize it. It is unfortunate that there is no regional pricing as the author mentions, but we know how easy those can be to circumvent.
At that point, if I were paying 1$ per year just to support a news outlet, I'd feel like the 230$ option is like they're spitting in the face of the already paying consumers though.
On the other hand, Netflix directly spat in the face of everyone when they said no more sharing accounts, and they're still doing fine, so what do I know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Super nice to hear you were able to have a connection like that though! That feels a little similar to emailing the author of a peer reviewed article - in many cases they're just a research nerd and don't get a dime from the publication journal that's pay walling their article, so if you mail them and ask nicely, they'll probably just send you a direct PDF :)