As Covid-19 pandemic is raging globally and the number of positive cases rise, it becomes important that authentic new flow about the ongoing health crisis continues. Taking this in consideration, major new publishers in the US have dropped their paywalls and made coronavirus coverage available to non-subscribers.
In the recent weeks, publishers from The Atlantic and The Philadelphia Inquirer to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News have made access to the coverage free.
“This is a public health emergency. If we have information that’s important for people to read, I’m not sure how ethical it would be to keep that from them if they didn’t give me their credit card,” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, told Adweek last month. It’s the first time The Atlantic has moved coverage outside of the paywall since it went live last year.
Coverage on pandemic on Bloomberg.com, which created its digital membership program in 2018, is in front of the paywall “for free indefinitely,” a spokesperson told Adweek. The New York Times also has a page accessible to everyone without a subscription and a free coronavirus-centric newsletter.
The Los Angeles Times has a free landing page and newsletter while The Wall Street Journal’s teams are feeding a live page that is available to read without a subscription, according to Adweek.
Closer home, many Indian publishers too have made access to non-subscribers easy. Now, you can read 20 free articles a month on The Hindu instead of 10. “This is a part of our efforts to bring accurate information about the Covid-19 pandemic to a larger audience. We are also making available our most informative reports on the coronavirus as an eBook that you can download for free,” editor of The Hindu said on 20 March.
Business Standard too has dropped its paywall for the next four months, making all Covid-19 related stories free and accessible to all. “In view of the widespread dissemination of news on Covid-19 outbreak, Business Standard is making all such content free on its website for four months from the date of their publication,” the newspaper said on 23 March.
ET Prime, a members-only business storytelling platform from the house of The Economic Times, has also made coverage of Covid-19 free. The Morning Context, an independent subscription-only media platform that publishes one story each day, has suspended its regular coverage on 23 March for a week and ran a special series documenting and analysing the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic across tech, business and chaos. Every story was free to read.
