Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay
The future of paid journalism content on t’Internet.
The print industry has been in steady decline since the dawn of the Internet, too slow to adapt in time to cope online economically. But as free content continues to swamp cyber space, how newspapers and their websites can best utilise their print and online content to survive and prosper financially is a moot point. Staff numbers have been savaged, paper sizes slashed, and online subscriptions for archive material dragged in and, in many cases, then abandoned. The Times’ Richard Pérez-Peña reported last week that in 2007 the combined print and online advertising revenue was down 7 per cent, which begs the questions: what does the muddied media’s future pave for paid news content?
“I don’t think paid content is ever going to be workable. Although a small number of people may pay a subscription to get their content from preferred offline publications, the majority are used to getting things without any kind of charge online, and will simply go to media outlets that don’t have any subscription,” says Stephen Ackroyd, editor of music webzine This Is Fake Diy. His is a viewpoint underlined by the New York Times last September when it retired its heavily scrutinised two-year-old online subscription service, TimesSelect, and let all its text run free. BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis called it “a cynical act doomed from the start”, but its timely demise, he claims, has taught the industry an important economic lesson. It’s a lesson highlighted by the 10 per cent increase in The New York Times’ online unique users less than month after it scrapped its subscription, according to Compete’s Alex Patriquin.
Jarvis stresses the role of Google in generating advertising for news websites, which led to the sharp increase in The New York Times’ website traffic, and will predictably keep them afloat without charging readers to access content. Paul Anderson, a journalism professor at City University and sub-editor at The Guardian, agrees: “The key is getting advertising to migrate online while providing editorial free online.” TimesSelect failed in doing this as its pay-for archives and articles by their esteemed columnists were prevented from being accessed via vital Google searches and links from blogs. Jarvis explains: “Google has been trying to convince media companies for years that if they made their archives available…they would improve their position and branding in Google searches, gaining yet more revenue.” After all, he notes, Google control 40 per cent of online advertising. Alex Flahive, a BBC journalist, agrees: “Several sites have probably realised that free news content leads to higher hits and outweighs the money they would raise from a subscription service.”
Rupert Murdoch, however, is insistent on bucking the freebie trend. Since he acquired the Wall Street Journal’s publishers Dow Jones last December, rumours circulated that he intended to knock down its pay wall, which Jarvis estimated at generating £40m in revenue. In a recent speech at City University, Alan Cowell, a foreign correspondent at The New York Times, claimed it was a decision that would “shake up the industry” and have a huge impact on the direction of other newspaper giants. The rumours were proved half true last week when the Media Guardian revealed Murdoch’s plans to implement a subscription for its “premium content”, aiming also to launch “a range of “niche” paid-for websites aimed at the business community.”
Although these ideas may take a few years to execute, Murdoch’s vision of the future of paid content echoes the route that the broadcast industry has taken, with genres of television programmes splintering off into a wide range of digital, cable and satellite channels that provide specifically targeted, ‘niche’ content – and some come at a cost (i.e. Premier League football on Sky). General content remains relatively free across ITV, Channel Four and Five, as Murdoch intends to do with the WSJ’s website, but for unique content, such as American imports, as with E4, and rolling news, as with BBC News 24, viewers must subscribe to digital television and so become prey to similarly specifically targeted advertising. It could mean that in the future, publications like The Guardian could follow suit, installing a subscription service for their fresh –and heavily relied on– content, such as its Media Guardian supplement.
It’s a decent option: keep all the breaking national and international stories that will, in some form, appear across all news sites free but charge for specialised content that will in turn attract specialised advertising. Dan Kennedy, on his blog Media Nation, makes another similar suggestion for US newspapers: “With a dozens of national and international news sites just a click away, major metropolitan newspapers are going to have to concentrate almost exclusively on local news, sports, business and the arts”. Obviously the scale is less so in Britain, and nationals in the States are in effect regionals, but it’s a model that requires some thought and, in some form, could work over here too.
And what of magazines? Arguably they have generally less of an online presence worldwide (Vogue, for example, has individual national websites, not one website that reaches across countries), so can they outlive newspapers, whose websites are updated by the second? “Newspapers update their sites very well, as do a few magazines,” says Ackroyd, “but until a lot of the more niche magazines work out how to publish online, they won’t bring in the eyeballs to cover the costs of running a website that is complete enough to compete with web-specific publications.” Publications such as the Economist charge for the majority of its online and certainly print material, but, as Anderson rightly points out, “I’m very much prepared to pay for the Economist on a sub[scription] so I can search its back issues for the past 10 years because it is specialised content you can’t get anywhere else.” However, the Economist possesses the manpower to enable such an archive, which, as Ackroyd suggests, the smaller and even more niche magazines don’t. It is the same story here too then, except perhaps magazines are one step ahead as most already fall within niche categories. Innovation is, of course, key here: packages like Dazed & Confused’s Dazed: Digital is like the magazine form, yet funkier, Web 2.0-streetwise and repackaged for readers who prefer to consume content online – they could probably charge for this successfully too.
The Economist aside, Jeff Jarvis sees the future purely in advertising and not subscriptions to support the media. To summarise his prophetic commentary on the topic is a mean feat, but in short he advises that we should open up our networks via linking as much as possible (i.e. a Times article should link to five Guardian ones and vice versa), which will not only generate advertising revenue, it will create new “high-value” networks to create a new marketplace to sidestep Google’s monopoly over online advertising. “It’s the relationship that is valuable,” he urges, “…not the control of the content or the distribution.”
How this filters down to print publications is another just as complicated issue. If every article, as Jarvis suggests should, becomes free online, what place is there then for newspapers? “Dead-trees publications aren’t over. If I’m commuting or having breakfast in the cafe or waiting in the pub for a mate I don’t want the inconvenience of a computer. Paper works perfectly,” insists Anderson. It’s a view shared by many journalists of the ‘old guard’, to whom typewriters and copy spikes are not too distant memories. But journalists reared in the Web 2.0 future question whether views like Anderson’s are too romantic.
Rather they are partial to reasoning like Omer Ali’s, a freelance journalist and former sub-editor at Time Out: “I think we’ll only start happily paying for online content when we get used to a good reading device, starting with the iPhone.” Would such a gadget sway Anderson? After all, viewing news on an iPhone is just as simple, pleasurable (if you get exciting by whizzing screens, that is) and costs less than it does to flick through ink-stained pages. Perhaps even in the future news can be tailored according to which device you own, making the difference between the new gadgets little changed from the difference between tabloid, broadsheets, regional, local, evening and free papers, and magazines. Doubts over whether newspapers have a purpose are further cemented by the fact that The Guardian sees itself as a website with a paper rather than the other way around. Nevertheless, they say old habits die hard and this is one one-hundred-year-old hang-up that has got some serious addicts yet.
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