How do the media solve a problem like the paywall? Simple. They make it a ‘saywall’. A saywall is an easier sell and it’s easier to scale.
A saywall is a two-way paywall. It’s a paywall where people don’t just pay to access content, but pay to have ‘a say’ in that content. To co-author and shape it. In short, to create it.
With the saywall, news doesn’t flow in one direction to paying readers from the ‘newsroom’ — an anachronism in the age of platforms.
Instead, credible and approved readers — often experts in their fields — pay to have their say. They become co-writers, co-creators, an extension of publishers’ news desks.
The ‘newsroom’ is effectively decentralised. It morphs into what Deleuze might call a ‘newsplane’, where readers not only help create stories but help validate the stories created by others — key in the age of AI.
On the decentralised newsplane, verified experts and members of the public work alongside journalists. There is no hierarchy, there are no narratives — and above all there is no hegemony as to what constitutes truth.
A saywall creates richer journalism, more impartial journalism and more democratic (ergo more shareable) journalism than a paywall ever could. It results in:
- more stories: right now, good stories that should be written aren’t being written because of capacity constraints. If publishers make their audiences an extension of their newsrooms, generating pre-validated content at scale, they get more stories at less cost.
- faster stories: engaged co-creators can feed content into progressive publishers in real time, again at scale. They are part of the content creation process, meaning not just more stories but faster stories.
- verified stories: through their volume, engaged and verified reader-creators can help validate the news content being generated, with journalists performing additional fact-checks as and when needed. The newsplane operates like a blockchain, removing ‘fake news’.
- richer stories: stories being fed from the bottom-up, whether from regional, sectoral or national audiences, are democratic by default. Diversity of voice and new insights and intel as audiences grow creates more shareable, richer news. News that connects.
- more relevant stories: over-reliance on a centralised news team, or hub, increases publishers’ risk of creating vanilla content. Decentralised news content, in contrast, is hyper-targeted, hyper-regional and hyper-relevant.
- impartial stories: political narratives cannot survive on a newsplane due to the multiplicity of perspectives from credible and verified sources. Audiences are sick of narratives — and news media that denarrate their content first will fly.
Saywalls aren’t fully scalable, of course. Nothing involving cash is. Only free can guarantee that.
But they are infinitely more scalable than the paywall. Saywalls are really just a bridge where the exit for publishers is increased scale, engagement and traffic.
Once publishers have achieved more scale by decentralising and democratising the way they source and present news, they can retain the two-way architecture and switch the saywall off.
Or leave it as an additional revenue stream — a little cherry on top.
