When publications remove themselves from the conversation

John Battelle wonders why the Wall Street Journal and The Economist -- "two august bastions of journalism" and great writing -- have fallen off his reading list.

One major reason, John says, is this:

[B]oth are nearly impossible to find if you get your daily dose of news, analysis and opinion from the blogosphere. ...

Even if I did read the Journal's feeds, I wouldn't refer to them in any posts of mine, as my readers and community can't read what I read. More and more, I find that if I can't share something (i.e. can't point to something), it's not worth my time. (Please take note, RIAA...)

I find, increasingly, that sites which wall themselves off are becoming irrelevant. Not because the writing or analysis is necessarily flawed (though honestly, I don't trust journalists who eschew the blogosphere), but rather because their business model is. In today's ecosystem of news, the greatest sin is to cut oneself off from the conversation. Both the Economist and the Journal have done that.

John's proposal?

Take the plunge and allow deep linking. Notice I did not say abandon paid registration, in fact, I support it. Publishers can let the bloggers link to any story they post, but limit further consumption of their site to paid subscribers.

Niall Kennedy adds this in the comments section of Searchblog: "Paul Carr of The Guardian has some interesting take on why bloggers are good for profits. Since implementing a system similar to what you suggest their traffic has gone up 'alarmingly' and weekly paid subscriptions have increased 20%."

Now, there are two separated but related issues here: link rot and walled gardens.

Link rot remains a major problem for online newspapers. After a week or two, articles at most major online newspapers fall behind a paid archive curtain. Thus, many bloggers won't link to them, knowing that the links will rot in a matter of days. The New York Times ameliorates this to a large extent by allowing a special Userland url workaround (enter your NY Times url in Aaron's magic converter and voila!). I'm surprised other newspapers haven't followed the Times' lead on this.

The walled-garden problem goes even deeper. At this summer's BlogOn conference, I suggested that the Wall Street Journal was becoming less relevant in an internetworked world because of its resistance to becoming part of the blogosphere's conversation. I've been a WSJ.com subscriber the past several years but may let my subscription lapse next time around because I'm generally not able to link to the writers I regularly read there, such as Kara Swisher and Nick Wingfield. The only WSJ articles I've linked to from my blog have been Walt Mossberg's columns (which fall outside the firewall) and a handful of articles that don't require a subscription to the paper.

When I wrote a report for the Newspaper Association of America last fall about mandatory registration at online news sites, I found that an increasing number of papers that required registration allowed users to read an article without registering because they were being driven to the site by search engines like Google or sites like DrudgeReport.com. It didn't make sense, these managers told me, to close off their site to vast numbers of newcomers. The same principle applies to subscription-only sites like the Journal.

For years, Doc Searls has been hammering home the point that online news publications are squandering their authority and relevance in cyberspace, and now John offers a smart solution. Let's see if any media companies step up.