Whenever you click on a news article, you often get a banner asking you to subscribe to either read the whole article or to access further material on that site. The one exception to this in the past has been The Irish Times, which provided free access to students. This has since changed, with the justification being that the organisation needs to start charging to “continue funding trusted news”. The charge for access is set at €5 a month or €50 annually. In pint terms, that’s probably about five these days.
The implementation of this fee is bound to have an impact on the ability of students to access trustworthy news sources. Unfortunately, this is not unique to The Irish Times. Other news sources such as The Irish Independent, The New York Times and The Telegraph all place restrictions on the amount of news one can access for free.
On the one hand, journalism isn’t cheap. Writers need paying, it is expensive to print, travel and sourcing cost money. The cost of writing and publishing well-sourced and researched articles is significant. A standard year subscription of The New York Times costs $90 annually. The company reported that their operational costs for a quarter were at $596 million in 2025, with a profit of $131.4 million. A large company, with a large budget, but also a large profit margin.
But what is the impact on students? The ability to access correct sources of news, international and domestic, is essential for certain subjects. I found myself earlier this year subscribing to a week of The New York Times to read one single article for an essay I was writing. The process felt futile and ridiculous to pay to access less than 1000 words. And this is the position of many students. News outlets can be invaluable for providing source material for essays, projects, reports, even articles such as this. By putting a paywall in front of these sources, the risk is that part of the student population is outpriced, meaning information is only available to those who can foot the annual bill. It seems markedly unfair that financial burdens be placed on students already combatting a cost-of-living crisis and now having to add extra costs onto the annual college fees.
The other risk of a financial barrier being imposed on the news is that young people are not accessing reliable sources. A large majority of teenagers and young adults will most likely be receiving their news from TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and others. No one needs a journalism qualification to post a story. It is not required that a list of sources is provided at the end of a 40-second TikTok video. The danger is that biased, inflammatory, and purely inaccurate reporting becomes students’ only source of news if they are unable to afford the price of a subscription. This has been markedly seen in the recent shooting of a civilian by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. The video that has circulated has been reported on in various ways, providing a wide range of narratives being posted to social media platforms. And if this is how students get their news, how are they supposed to trust it?
Elizabeth Barry, who has previously worked as a PR consultant spoke to me about this issue. “I understand that journalists need paying for the work they do, but it does force PR companies to sometimes take out subscriptions. This is because we must have access to a vast number of articles written by a range of journalists. I experienced this on my year abroad living in Paris. Whilst good PR companies will take out these subscriptions, sometimes young workers could feel forced to pay to be able to do their job”. On her experience in her final year of her studies doing Philosophy and French, she commented that “trying to read foreign articles was sometimes difficult because they were behind a paywall. I would therefore have to read a different article which was often shorter and less helpful for my language learning”.
It is fundamentally expensive to be a student: living in Dublin, being able to go out, transport costs, the list goes on. It is understandable that good quality journalism costs. But, ethically, students struggling to pay being unable to access news sites seems wrong. Profiting from the present, from those simply wishing to educate themselves on world events shouldn’t be happening. It is a disservice to young people, disadvantaging them in an economic climate which is already a losing battle.
