2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web | Hacker News Reader

2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web

mcgarrsolicitors.ie

56 pointsCountHackulus33 comments

Let them. Let them start charging for links. Let them miss out on the free SEO and let them fall off the face of the search engines. Let them lose their readership because nobody can find them and let them go bankrupt because no one is looking at their ads. This is how the internet works. If they can't figure that out, then its no ones loss but their own. A less greedy company will be happy to have sites link back to them and will eventually take their place.

I honestly believe that this is happening to most papers already. There are notice exceptions, but they are few.

Counterpoint: The New York Times Paywall Is Working Better Than Anyone Had Guessed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4970846

Counterpoints to your counterpoint: The New York Times is a) doing ok for now but not great [1] b) most importantly, the NYT is an American institution that is in a league of their own. Few newspapers have the prestige, quality and history of the NYT.

[1] Stock price for NYT has gone down 80% in the last 10 years: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ANYT&ei=g9XhUJiAJ6...

Not to mention that despite their paywall, anyone can still link to an article in the NYT, and people can read it for free (as long as they haven't read too many articles that month). The NYT seems to have realized that the links to them from all over the web are free advertising that they can't afford to do without, and that having lots of people discuss their articles on the web makes them more influential.

Prestige and quality may help the NYT be successful in charging for content but that doesn't mean smaller local newspapers will fail if they try the same tactics. Warren Buffet seems to think that the paper editions of local newspapers will not fail (especially in areas with strong community) and owns over 20 now. It seems likely that eventually they will just charge for online access and be successful at it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2012/06/22/would-yo...

Talking about Warren Buffet

http://www.wtop.com/164/3176295/Manassas-News-Messenger-prin...

"The Manassas News & Messenger is no more. The paper printed its final edition after 143 years of covering the news...."

"All employees lost their jobs, and 72 other jobs have been cut in the company."

The newspapers listed in the article are nowhere near as big as the NYT.

I think that's his point. If a large newspaper such as the New York Times isn't able to sustainably charge for content, even with readers that largely depend on it for their livelihoods, then how is a smaller newspaper going to get away with similar practices without losing much of their consumer base.

That paywall works because it actually allows you to read some articles. Solid paywalls in the past have failed terribly.

So it's a paysponge then. Somewhat porous rather than brick solid. A news squeegee if you will.

Does Google have to pay the NYT for each link to a NYT page in their search results? I doubt it. That is what the Irish papers are proposing. The NYT has decided that Google traffic is so important, they will let users access their content for free if they come from a Google results page. That to me reinforces the idea that charging people to link to you is self defeating.

Yup. The NYT paywall is quite "leaky" in general, and it seems that the paper is not particularly bothered by this; you can easily play simple URL or cookie games to avoid the paywall, and this hasn't changed in ages. Their web team is very good, and it's pretty certain they're aware of all this.

In other words, it appears that the paywall is intended not so much to prevent people from reading the paper free, as it is to remind people "hey this is a great world-class paper, if you read it a lot, how about a subscription?" I routinely go around the paywall, but I always end up seeing the "hey subscribe" reminder first...

It's a subtle and risky game to be sure, but they appear to be playing it better than most.

Forget "Organic PageRank benefits", if Google can't link to it, then they can't show it on search results. This would kill any and all organic searches.

Good luck to them... This was already tried in belgium http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/google-versus-bel... years ago

Belgium... Ireland... who's next, Andorra?

Frankly, 99.9+% of the world's population can get through their day without learning what happens in Ireland unless and until it affects a country with a more direct impact on their lives. The fact that country will almost certainly have newspapers that aren't actively trying to get blacklisted by search engines is just a nice extra.

Ignorance may certainly be bliss but dismissing something because it presumably didn't happen in America takes that idea a bit too far.

I of course never said anything like that, but it is a sign of how far we've come that it gets read that way. Cast your mind back to 1983 and ask yourself if 1983-you would have felt deprived not knowing the latest from Ireland unless and until a non-Irish news source, like the BBC, picked up on the story. Of course not!

This isn't the 1983 or the BBC, it's 2013 and a niche news aggregator powered by its readers.

If you just want stories that are big enough to be picked up by the BBC, read that instead.

Cast your mind back to 1983 and ask yourself if 1983-you would have felt deprived not knowing the latest from Ireland unless and until a non-Irish news source

Fun fact: What happened in 1983 in Ireland was relevant to India in 2012.

In 1983, Ireland passed a pro-life consitutional amendment, banning abortion in all cases (in practice)¹. In 2012, an dentist from India living in Ireland who was miscarrying and dying asked for a termination to save her life, she was refused one, and eventually died².

¹: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_of_the_Constit... ²: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar

Yes, if you travel to another country its laws will affect you. Is your claim that if the eighth amendment had been published in Indian newspapers in 1983 that this would not have happened?

The point is not how provincal or remote we are; the point is that this would establish a legal precedent. It's common for legal precedents to be cited across the border between the UK and Ireland; and if this showed up in the UK, it's now able to spread to a lot of other places.

And that'd be just fine for certain well-funded lobbying groups...

But Irish people do, and that's partially the point.

If this can happen in Ireland or Belgium, you can bet that organizations in other countries will consider doing the same thing.

Someone should get on the horn to the grandchildren of the newspaper executives; they need to explain the tubes again.

I'm the author of this piece. If you'd like to see the letters we wrote on behalf of Women's Aid in response to the demands for money for links you can see them http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2012/05/10/newspaper-licencin...

and

http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2012/12/06/newspaper-licensin...

Thank you for your interest.

Anyone can try to get money for links. The internet alternative of course is to eliminate all of their readership from anyone other than the local pub.

This isn't going to last very long.

In a few months, at the outside, they (the newspapers) will have a condescending piece of back-pedaling that implies we were all too stupid to understand their statements, because obviously they never so much as implied they would charge people to link to them, and saying they did means we just don't get it. Then they'll maintain strict silence over it and refuse to even acknowledge questions about it.

I hate when they do that.

Those who don't learn history ...

Grooooss. Wonder how state-funded and regulated Irish newspapers are.

Nothing in the article suggests they are at all. What made you say that?

We have extremely strict libel legislation, and an independent press ombudsman. State funding is not a factor in the finances of the major papers who pushed for the measures mentioned in this article

Regulation can be a form of oppression. Press freedom index. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index

State-funded? Not really at all? Regulated, not very.

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