I just reread my post from two weeks ago. It's vaguely about The Onion but peel back the layers and you'll find a little jab at paywalls: ...while our so-called great media institutions hide behind paywalls...
Back in my day, you couldn't charge for an hours-old paper, but thankfully paywalls remedied this issue. You can now pay full price to read something written three weeks ago about something that happened three months ago. Of course, the paywall has created its own strange conundrum - it means we're charged equally regardless of the news being old or, well, news. Dystopian, right?
Charging for old news is a magazine's job, since old news isn't news. So what's behind the paywall, a newspaper or a magazine? It feels like an important distinction; something just doesn't sit right with me about a world that charges for news. It's a little like being lied to by omission - instead of being told fake things, you just aren't told anything, at least until you open your wallet; for a low monthly fee, all the world becomes a stage again, and we are merely payers.
