When The New York Times announced its plan, beginning next year, to charge visitors a fee to access its website, many questioned the viability of that paywall strategy — or any paywall strategy, for that matter. This week, Clay Shirky, who teaches new media at NYU, writes: “General-interest papers struggle to make paywalls work because it’s hard to raise prices in a commodity market. … Any given newspaper competes with a few other newspapers, but any newspaper website compete[s] with all other websites.”
While the basic structure remains more or less the same for most news — lede, nut, quote, lather, rinse, repeat — variance is achieved through differences in reportage and writing style among different news outlets.
When something happens, like trapped workers being rescued from a mine, many papers report on the same event, but their reporting differs. Surely, the discerning reader must have a preference.
To dig further, I surveyed 60 workers on Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s “artificial artificial intelligence” service. Turkers were asked to read short passages, consisting of the lede and nut paragraph, from four major newspapers reporting on the same topic: the S.F. Giants winning the World Series. Afterward, Turkers rated the writing, on a scale from 1 to 5, for clarity, quality, and interestingness. Here are our <disclaimer>completely unscientific, inconclusive</disclaimer> results:
I’m reluctant to jump to any conclusions based on this informal survey, though it’s hardly surprisingly that USA Today ranks highest for clarity in both instances, as most of their articles seem to be written at a first grade reading level. Zing! Nonetheless, it’s nice to see quantifiable data that broadly outlines reader reception of each outlet’s story. Whether these differences are significant enough for the Times to successfully deploy a paywall remains to be seen.
The articles referenced can be found at the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today.
