Not worth my 99 cents

Two weeks ago, bloggers and Twitterers got angry about the return of a pretty terrible idea: small payments for each newspaper article, or micropayments. Former TIME managing editor Walter Isaacson thought he had saved newspapers, Steven Brill agreed, and David Carr was all, “Let’s make an iTunes for newspapers“.

The idea won’t work for a variety of practical reasons, outlined best by Clay Shirky and Steve Outing. Basically, people don’t like getting nickel and dimed; iTunes was created to sell iPods, not music; and journalism micropayments fail elsewhere.

But even if micropayments would work, I don’t think newspapers should adopt them because micropayments would further divide society on political lines. In a micropayment system, I won’t be interested in spending money on an article criticizing Obama, and my conservative father won’t be interested in spending money on an article criticizing Bush. People end up only reading what confirms their opinions, and the base of facts that everyone agrees on grow ever smaller.

Even when people paid for newspaper content, they could buy the paper for one reason and end up reading something that challenged their worldviews, and share that article with their friends for free.  In Brill’s payment plan, though, sharing an article with someone else would cost five cents. I’m not going to waste five cents on the off-chance of setting someone straight when it could just get me another Paul Krugman article.

Under a successful micropayment system, society would grow more polarized. But hey, at least newspapers wouldn’t ever have to change.

By the way, if you needed more proof that Isaacson is behind the times, he calls the EZTag toll system a “gizmo”. EZTag’s convenient, but it’s hardly a gizmo.

Photo from Doublespeak with Matthew and Peter Slutsky used under a Creative Commons license

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