I learned that a small plane landed on the Hudson near Newburgh, NY* from a notification on my laptop that said the story was from WNYC. So I went there. Found nothing. Then I went to Google News and searched for plane+hudson. Wanting to give some linklove to one of the local news (formerly newspaper) outlets, I went to the Times-Union, which accused me of blocking ads (which I don’t: I block tracking) and tried to shake me down for a subscription, which I don’t want because I don’t live there. But (this is key) I am glad to pay a small amount using EmanciPay. which doesn’t yet exist, but should.
I make the case for EmanciPay in many places, the most recent being The New News Business.
Bear this in mind: the Web is all hypertext. Files on it are meant to be linked. When you defeat that purpose, you defeat the Web itself.
Stop now and read The Longing, one of David Weinberger‘s chapters in The Cluetrain Manifesto. David wrote it in 1999, or maybe earlier. But it’s still spot-on about what the Web is, and what we risk by losing it. Excerpts:
There are many ways to look at what’s drawing us to the Web: access to information, connection to other people, entrance to communities, the ability to broadcast ideas. None of these are wrong perspectives. But they all come back to the promise of voice and thus of authentic self…
The voice that the Web gives us is not the ability to post pictures of our cat and our guesses at how the next episode of The X-Files will end. It is the granting of a place in which we can be who we are (and even who we aren’t, if that’s the voice we’ve chosen).
It is a public place. That is crucial. Having a voice doesn’t mean being able to sing in the shower. It means presenting oneself to others. The Web provides a place like we’ve never seen before.
We are losing that place today. Google is doing it by turning search from a librarian to a “helpful assistant” who forgets what’s in the library. News outlets large and small are fighting the Web’s library by putting a paywall in front of every different periodical in the Web’s Reference section.
Maybe the way to save both the Web and these periodicals is to come up with a better way for people to pay what they like, in countless small amounts, like we have with the convention called tip jars.
So far, I haven’t seen anything better than EmanciPay for doing that. Because only EmanciPay starts by giving readers their own way to pay whatever they like, wherever they like, automatically and with minimal friction. Installing mechanisms and valves on the sell side alone works for a few large publication, but fails for all the rest of them.
We need solutions that start on the readers’ side. EmanciPay is one of them.
*Credit where due: that link goes to the Mid Hudson News, and reported by Hank Gross, who founded it. It has no paywall. Hats off.
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