It happened this week on successive days; on Tuesday and Wednesday. Two people, who work in the public administration, who consider themselves friends of mine, asked me to copy the texts of an article that I published on Sunday (my Diario de València) and another by Enric Juliana, and to send them by email or WhatsApp message. They justified the demand because both contents were "closed", that is, they could only be read if you were a La Vanguardia subscriber. It is not the first time that this has happened to me and I admit that on some occasions I have given in to the demand, sometimes out of a certain vanity, you know, that "that's how they read me." But this week I acted differently: I refused. After which I received an indignant response in both cases, loaded with quite a bit of criticism. I asked the two "friends" (they are two men) a question: How much do you think news is worth?
With the emergence of the digital paradigm there has been a depreciation in the value of the informant's work. It is not only a phenomenon that affects journalism, it has been happening for years with any cultural production, from a song to a novel. On the contrary, appropriating intellectual creation "for free" has become a well-regarded sport. Despite efforts to prevent piracy, there are still many "influencers" or "brats" who on social networks explain formulas or ways to access free musical, literary creations, films and also journalistic content. I will focus on the case of journalism, because I believe that it is the one that currently has great difficulty in reversing what a few years ago was the norm: that readers could come and read everything for free.
This week, in a visit organized to the European Parliament for journalists invited by Inmaculada Rodríguez Piñero, we were lucky enough to speak with MEPs who have actively participated in the configuration of two legislative packages; one referring to freedom of the press and another to the regulation of AI in Europe. In the first case, the experts recognized that they still have not found the magic "formula" that guarantees stable financing models for traditional media, and that without this financing it is difficult to have human resources, independence and quality of content. They advocated, however, subscription as the only valid way to compensate for the loss of income from traditional advertising, which passionately uses social networks, search engines and other digital platform formulas.
When I spoke with these two friends who asked me for free content, I had not yet arrived in Brussels, but I have long assumed the framework of thought: establishing close complicity with readers, through subscription, is the best way to work. not only in a stable funding channel, but also to generate a community in which journalists respond to the needs of readers in addition to offering them a correct hierarchy of those topics that are important every day, with rigor and contrast, in the face of chaos. produced by the inexhaustible flow of information on the Internet. It is nothing new, it already happened in the analog period, when the reader understood perfectly that paying every day to buy the newspaper in paper meant establishing a contract of trust with the publisher. This had been the case for more than a century and a half. The Internet complicated everything.
EU experts told us that the higher the quality of a country's press, the healthier its democracy, with all that that implies. When the media is weakened, for various reasons, from lack of stable funding to partisan and even state control, for example in Hungary or the previous Polish executive, social cohesion and individual rights lose, with direct effects on people , sometimes dramatic. It is not a hypothesis, a multitude of indicators confirm it. I did not have time to explain all this to my "friends", I simply told them that for a few euros they could have at their disposal the daily work of an excellent work by my editorial colleagues, and that by reading us they would understand the meaning a little better. world. They hung up on me, in both cases.
PS: I still don't understand those who copy and post their articles in their entirety on social networks while the digital editions are paid for. Sometimes, we are our own worst enemies.
