So we’re nearly six months into producing The Pickup as an independent online publication here in Tulsa, and during that time we’ve occasionally encountered some curiosity about how we’re able to do that. Specifically we’ve received a couple of variations on questions about the paywall: “What’s up with the paywall?” “Why can’t I read this story without paying?” These are valid questions, and I thought it would be worthwhile to answer them.
I’ve spent my career in journalism writing and editing full-time for media outlets (Oklahoma Gazette, The Oklahoman) and working as a freelancer for others (This Land, Outside, The Tulsa Voice, KOSU), all as the industry was being gutted. In the 2010s I saw a lot of journalists get laid off, failed pivots to video and whole companies swapped back and forth between billionaires and venture capital firms like bundles of bad debt. The executives always seemed to do fine, while those of us who did the productive labor of a news organization—spending hours listening to public comments at city council meetings, slowly cultivating relationships with a diverse array of sources, writing and editing, always—found ourselves without jobs. Many took our storytelling skills with us into other industries or juggled multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Meanwhile audiences moved online, people in the C-suite made short-sighted or plainly bad decisions, and the few journalists left in the game found themselves working unsustainably long hours or laid off without warning. Facebook and Google hoovered up advertising revenues that media outlets had relied on for decades, beating them out with better technology. Meanwhile the user experience on legacy media websites worsened to the point of hostility, and free alternative weekly publications—that historically derive the majority of their income from advertising—either went out of business or restrategized to cultivate a base of paying subscribers.1
But, like moss steadily reclaiming the surfaces of an abandoned house, new opportunities crept up as journalists around the world realized they no longer needed a front office or leadership team to cultivate a direct relationship with their audiences.
Some of these journalists went nonprofit, which works fine so long as your perspective and publishing agenda aligns neatly with that of your funders, who often tend to be philanthropists or big corporates. On this model you have to spend time fundraising and maintaining good relationships with those funders. Even if that goes well, you might find yourself defunded by a noxious political leader.
Other journalists got small and took to Substack or Patreon, asking for monthly payments from a dedicated audience of subscribers. This is the route we’ve chosen for The Pickup, and we like it because it’s simple, straightforward and closely resembles the industry distribution mechanisms of the past. Podcasts replaced radio, YouTube replaced broadcast television, Substack and newsletters replaced newspapers and magazines.
Much like This Land before us, we wanted The Pickup to remain as independent as possible, which means a high-priority business goal for us is to cultivate a broad base of paying subscribers. Alicia, Zack and I like this approach because our chief business goal aligns neatly with our and our publisher This Land Press’s editorial goals to produce distinct, original journalism centering Tulsa. We don’t have to run anything past some mysterious suit a few floors up, and we get to write directly for you all, our readers. The incentives are straightforward and harmonious.
That brings us back to the question of the paywall. We paywall our website because the work we produce has value. Alicia, Zack and I find writers with clear, distinct voices and work with them to develop their ideas, ask pertinent questions about day-to-day life in Tulsa, shape rich, humane stories, and ultimately push these stories out the door and into your arms. We don’t use AI to make anything up and we don’t pay 22-year-olds $50 for shitty listicles. We do seek out people in our community who aren’t necessarily experienced journalists, and coax original work out of them because it enriches all of our lives with the purposefulness of shared experience.2