How David Simon is wrong about paywalls

CJR reporting:
David Simon is a talented writer and storyteller, but is he qualified to give advice to publishers about how to save their dying industry?
As qualified as anybody else, I suppose. But when he suggested in a recent piece for CJR that people like me who disagree with his position on paid content were unqualified, that got under my skin a bit. Simon wrote, “These folks (paywall opponents) don’t understand the first thing about actual journalism.” He also lumped us in with an imaginary crowd of people who supposedly think amateurs can replace professionals, though we take no such position.
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I decided to step back and lay out my thoughts in a more organized fashion. First, Simon and I agree: that journalism is important. That newspapers giving their content away for free online is a bad idea. That investigative/enterprise journalism is expensive. That the beat system plays an important role in watchdog journalism, and beat journalism requires paid professionals who are in it for the long haul.
That said, there are at least 10 arguments against paywalls.
1. The New York Times is a poor model on which to judge the success of paid content.
The Times is unique. It isn’t a local paper. Even the New York news covered by the Times has more national gravitas than local flavor. The Times has a global audience, and as a truly outstanding journalistic institution it has some key advantages: Namely, it comes closer than most other outlets to producing journalism on a consistent basis that people will actually pay for; and it produces journalism that people all over the world will consistently link to. These are powerful forces for creating the kind of added value that might lead to paid subscriptions.
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3. Even if a paywall alone can’t support big-time metro journalism, the early returns show no signs of slowing the bleed out.
One of the best and smartest metro newspaper editors of the past couple of decades, John Robinson, has said newspaper paywalls are a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
It’s an assessment backed by some hard facts.
While the Dallas Morning News logged 50,000 subscribers, it’s unclear how many of those are mere up-sells from print subscribers (hardly counting, then, as online-only revenue and loyal digital subscribers). The paper also saw monthly pageviews drop by 9 million. Consequently, digital revenue was down 11 percent to $7.8 million. The paper’s parent company, Belo, reported a net loss in the first quarter of $3.9 million. Meanwhile, the newspaper is spending $4 million a year to promote online subscriptions.
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http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/why_david_simon_is_wrong_about.php