“Is Harry Potter cancelled?”
It was a Toronto Star headline in my google news feed this morning. I clicked on it, and hit a paywall. I would have to become a paying subscriber to read the article.
Why would a Quebec resident subscribe to a mostly Toronto-centric newspaper? If there is any big Toronto news I need to know about, it will be covered on free national sites like CBC News and CTV News, and by subscriber-based outlets I do access free of charge by virtue of my work association with Postmedia News (The National Post, Financial Post, Montreal Gazette etc.).
I’m already a paying subscriber to the New York Times and to the independent news project recently launched by Christopher Curtis (a.k.a. The Rover) in association with Ricochet. And I’ve lost count of the free newsletters that show up in my email in-box.
So, it struck me this morning that the Toronto Star — and other newspapers with paywalls, no doubt — lost an opportunity by denying me free access to the Harry Potter opinion piece. At the least, they lost a click, and advertisers lost a pair of eyes. And the writer lost the joy of having one more person read their words.
I get why newspapers like the Toronto Star put up paywalls. They need subscribers because ad revenue isn’t sufficient. But they are not going to get many subscribers outside of the province of Ontario. Why not have software that allows national and international readers to access their sites freely, with ads from multi-nationals targeting them, and make the locals pay — as they should?
I know that most metro newspapers aren’t thinking about international readership, with the exception the New York Times, the Guardian and some others. The rationale is there’s little money in it for them — though they will happily take subscriptions from life forms anywhere in the universe.
But what harm would it have been if the Toronto Star allowed me to read the Harry Potter piece today?
Perhaps they don’t have the software for gateways that keep non-paying locals out and let national and international readers in. And perhaps they don’t really feel it is worth the money. Perhaps they see readers as dollar signs.
Personally, I treasure every reader, be it here or on my newspaper’s website.
As for the headline question about Harry Potter, no, of course not. We’ve had the discussion here before. Art stands alone, despite the controversies that may surround its creators. Harry Potter has not been cancelled. Nor have the works of Lewis Carroll, thought by some to have been too cozy with the real-life Alice, or Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, who both brought some great movies to the screen.
Once created, art stands alone.
— Jillian
Jillian Page 
I’ve had the same issue–and yes, the Toronto Star is probably the worst offender. I’d just rather not see the headlines in the first place if I’m not going to be allowed to read the article.
I live in Nova Scotia, but in the late 1980s I went to college in Belleville, Ontario and I purchased a Toronto Star every morning. I thought it was a great paper. I’d love to be still reading it, though not being in Ontario anymore, fewer stories would be relevant to me.
By the way, while I have never heard THAT particular story about Lewis Carroll, I do know he photographed nude young girls, though I don’t know if there were any of Alice.
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Lots of news sites have paywalls. Gotta pay the staff somehow. Given that there’s no real news that doesn’t spread around the free/advertising based internet I can only assume paying for a subscription to a site must have snob appeal.
You can’t cancel a phenomenon like Harry Potter. Just too popular. But people today don’t have a connection to older works. You might just be able to keep Carroll out of your library. If you can censor Mark Twain you can censor almost anything. Only die-hard civil libertarians like me ad people who have actually read the original works – and not just seen movies that are only vaguely connected to the original works – will complain. It’s easy to “cancel” out our objections.
It was a different age. Childhood nudity was considered innocent because children were supposedly asexual. It wasn’t just Carroll, you can see it in many works of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. At this time photography was considered very little different than painting except that most thought it required a lot less skill. We hold photography to a much different standard today.
Whether Carroll was a pedophile is a big debate and IMHO, unknown and unknowable. He has both strong supporters and strong detractors. There is very little contemporaneous evidence, mostly just commentary of what might have been by people from a different age.
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