Following my blog post yesterday on The New York Times and its decision to start charging for online content (click here for the blog post), I got an interesting comment through Facebook from one of my friends, Gulshan. He raised a very brief but valid point when he said "If news is charged hopefully then its all true."
This is indeed a good point because with everything and anything being accessible on the Internet as was pointed out by Alan Devereux, one of the people who commented on my original blog post, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe everything you read about on the Internet (Alan incidentally also wrote about paywalls on his blog as well, which you can read here).
Case in point: today's rumour mill was buzzing with stories of Jackie Chan's death, which it turned out to wasn't true.
If you pay for content, you therefore expect it to be authentic, verified and to the standards that you would expect to find in any respectable broadsheet publication.
Having said all that, would you be willing to start paying for content one day?
This is indeed a good point because with everything and anything being accessible on the Internet as was pointed out by Alan Devereux, one of the people who commented on my original blog post, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe everything you read about on the Internet (Alan incidentally also wrote about paywalls on his blog as well, which you can read here).
Case in point: today's rumour mill was buzzing with stories of Jackie Chan's death, which it turned out to wasn't true.
If you pay for content, you therefore expect it to be authentic, verified and to the standards that you would expect to find in any respectable broadsheet publication.
Having said all that, would you be willing to start paying for content one day?
