The Paywall may be journalism's Maginot Line | Hacker News Reader

The Paywall may be journalism's Maginot Line

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23 pointsdavewiner13 comments

The content just has to be good enough to be worth paying for. The internet is not killing newspapers by "stealing their news", but by raising the bar. In other words, the internet's supply of poor writing has made classical newspapers obsolete. Raise your standards!

...or useful enough to get your subscription paid for by your employer.

(see: the WSJ, Financial Times, the Economist)

Notice how by likening a paywall to the Maginot Line, the internet must take the role of Hitler's invading forces. I wonder if that was the author's deliberate implication.

I think that you're taking the analogy too far. The main point seems to be that the paywall is this 'line in the sand' that keeps moving as soon as the 'enemy' crosses it.

The maginot line failed because they only built it along the border with their enemy (germany) and didn't continue it along the border with their friend (belgium) - so the enemy simply drove around it.

In newspaper terms it's like having a paywall but allowing the full text of the story to appear via Google's cache.

> The maginot line failed because they ... didn't continue it along the border with their friend (belgium) - so the enemy simply drove around it.

Wikipedia says this is a myth:

> It is a myth however that the Maginot Line ended at the Belgian border and was easy to circumvent.[2] The fortifications were connected to the Belgian fortification system, of which the strongest point was Fort Eben-Emael.

[2] Mosier, J. The Blitzkrieg Myth: How Hitler and the Allies Misread the Strategic Realities of World War II, HarperCollins, 2004, pp. 2, 38.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line

Still happened though

Still something else happened --not the original argument (that they bypassed it because it wasn't extended to Belgium).

The moral of the story is that, while the Maginot Line would have been a perfect defense in World War I, it was ineffective in World War II. People are always preparing to fight the last war. Very common mistake. A failure of imagination.

item 2000000!

Also, the maginot line was a system of heavy (i.e. immovable) fortifications and France's only defensive plan. Once germany found a way around it (duh), France could not quickly change strategy (it didn't have a Plan B) or mobilize the resources sunk into the Line (they were concrete). Oops.

The Maginot line was built to stop anyone coming in. Hitler was not a major figure when it was built.

The Paywalls are being built to try and keep out the hordes, it represents the same fear of the unknown that created the Maginot line.

"""it represents the same fear of the unknown that created the Maginot line."""

If by "unknown" you refer to rival armies invading your country, yes, but it is still a very strange phrasing.

It wasn't build to protect from squirrels and tourists, you know...

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