05 Jun How to make your news organization irrelevant
New Brunswick residents anxious for news about the Moncton gunman might be expected to turn to their local newspaper’s website. Unless they are subscribers, this is what they will find:
All English language newspapers in New Brunswick belong to the Irving empire, and all use a single website, lodged firmly behind a paywall. As the Moncton drama unfolded last night, many on Twitter urged the company to lift the paywall while the gunman was at large and residents were hungry for information.
In a surprisingly querulous response, Fredericton Gleaner columnist Adam Bowie shed some light on the papers’ failure to respond:
After 14 hours, time enough for “newsroom inability” to morph into “management disinclination,” the paywall remains in place.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows about and sympathizes with the catastrophic challenges faced by all newspapers, including those belonging to the Irvings. Nevertheless, the refusal to lift the paywall in what most would term a civic emergency reinforces longstanding misgivings about the family’s management style, and betrays cluelessness about the journalistic environment they now occupy.
Kudos to the Halifax Chronicle-Herald for setting a better example:
