Paywalls make content better (Nick Thompson, editor in chief, Wired)

Channels with Peter Kafka

Vox Media Podcast Network

Business News, News, Tv & Film, Technology

4.4 • 585 Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2018

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Wired editor in chief Nick Thompson talks with Recode's Peter Kafka about the merits of running a print magazine in 2018 and why Wired.com is adding a $20/year paywall. Thompson, previously the editor of NewYorker.com, learned there that asking readers to pay for content changes not just their experience, but also how writers and editors do their jobs because now the pressure is on to make unique content that people will love. He also discusses why much of the conventional wisdom around Facebook's News Feed changes is wrong, the difference between writing for print versus the web and how he is reconciling Wired's original mission of techno-optimism with the realities of 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That is me. I am part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm recording this in New York in late January. If you're listening to this podcast when it comes out, you may still have time to buy a ticket to go see me and Kara Swisher and the people who run Facebook and YouTube and SoundCloud and Patreon and lots of other interesting companies at Code Media, February 12th and 13th in Huntington Beach.
0:24.7	Tickets may also be sold out. That is the peril of recording something in advance. You don't really know.
0:29.4	But anyway, it's a good event. You should go there in person. If you can't get there in person, we will bring highlights of that show to you on this podcast.
0:35.9	Okay, enough promo. I am here, as I said, in New York, with Nick Thompson, the editor-in-chief of Wired. Do we call it Wired magazine? We just call it Wired. I'm called Wired. Wired. Former editor of the New Yorker.com. Accomplished journalist, Avid Runner, who says in your bio. Sure.
0:54.7	I want to talk to you about a bunch of stuff, but the news, the news that has brought you to me today. I'll come here anytime you want me to come here, Peter. Deal. I was going to go about a future tense, past tense. You guys are putting up a paywall. You've announced it in the past. You're putting a paywall. the paywall is up.
1:10.3	Mm-hmm.
1:10.9	All right.
1:11.5	So if you're going to wire.com today, what do you encounter in terms of wall?
1:17.5	Well, if you go to wire.com five times today, which I hope you will, or if you click on five stories,
1:23.3	you will encounter a paywall that then asks you to subscribe. So it's a fairly typical publisher paywall.
1:28.0	Metered pay.
1:29.0	Yep.
1:29.4	You can read whatever you want, but if you read five stories in a month, we ask you to please pay us.
1:35.9	Paywall is an old idea, comes in and out of fashion.
1:39.2	It's back in fashion.
1:40.8	Yeah.
1:41.6	It's been ever more in fashion over the last couple of years as the media business has
1:46.8	changed and as people have watched how paywalls have succeeded and also as customers
1:53.9	have become more accustomed to them.
1:55.8	I want to talk about the mechanics of the paywall, but just philosophically, this is something
2:00.6	you're part of the Condi Nast family,
2:02.6	you guys had a paywall at the New Yorker, is the idea that all of the Condé publications
	...

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