Freedom isn’t free
Throughout my entire journalistic career, I’ve always had to walk this line – entertain my reader, but not at the expense of losing an advertiser. At the end of the day, a business’s main responsibility is to its customers. Can you, the freeloading reader, really blame them if they run articles that aren’t in your best interests?
Lau Chak Onn, fz.com
THE recent boycott of mainstream media has left us with online as our main source of media. So why are people still so reluctant to pay for it?
Recently, a guy posted something up on my Facebook about thinking twice before boycotting a major newspaper, as it had thousands of employees who had families to fee and whose jobs were now at risk.
My first thoughts were of incredulity – if a company wasn’t selling me something I liked, why would I feel the need to support its continued existence? But a few troll posts later, I realised something else – perhaps there weren’t enough jobs in other forms of media for these poor shmucks.
Apparently after GE13, we’re supposed to be boycotting radio stations, newspapers and television. Although television is probably like the old man in the apartment upstairs passing on quietly in the night and no one noticing for weeks, the first two are actually surprisingly still a part of my media diet. I listen to the radio whenever I run out of music, and read newspapers every time I need a good laugh.
However, there’s no denying that like many youngsters today (a demographic I’m barely clinging on to), I go online to get most of my information. Some of it is from news sites, some from links recommended by friends, and some from sites which I pay to subscribe to.
Many of the same people who participated in that thread about the newspaper boycott are the same people staring at me like an alien from another planet when I tell them that I pay for online content. Why pay when I can get it for free? So let me explain myself.
You see, writers need to eat.
