Today’s Sydney Morning Herald has an article about how Murdoch’s The Times in the UK will start charging web readers for news. You can see the (amusingly headlined) article here: Times are a-chargin’ for web browsers.
Along with many, many, (many!) other commentators, I’ve blogged about this topic before.
Apart form the beautiful irony [2] in this article from the Herald, I am pretty sure that this whole paywall argument is a dead-end for newspapers. Why? Because readers have never really paid for news. It’s the advertisers that pay. I could be wrong, but trying to make readers pay for something that can quite easily get elsewhere for free seems crazy.
The problem that newspapers face is not that readers (or aggregators) are stealing content, its that the business model upon which 20th Century newspaper journalism is based has collapsed. Advertisers chase eyeballs, and have simply followed the punters online. Not to mention the fact that their other major revenue stream – classifieds – has also left the building.
This is good and bad. If newspapers can’t generate revenue at their traditional scales, then neither will they be able to generate quality news. This will create opportunities for others (eg ABC) but it will almost certainly see a shake-up in the business of news making. And to be perfectly honest, it really does need a bit of a shake-up given the quality of “news” in some of the major dailies around this part of the world.
The underlying effect at work here is what I refer to as “the end of distribution”, which I blogged about some time back. The fact is that traditional newspapers assume their businesses are a scale play founded on the distribution of physical newspapers. The Internet removes distribution as a factor, and so almost self-evidently, traditional newspapers must struggle as their founding assumptions crumble.
Unless of course, they can change. But charging your readers for something that they have essentially always taken for free [3] when those who really pay your bills are running away seems like a pretty dumb idea.
M@
[1] If you want a really insightful analysis of this whole debate (without the vested newspaper interests) check out Mike Masnik’s blog: TechDirt. It’s a fantastic read.
[2] If it’s not obvious, the clear irony is that we have one newspaper (SMH) reporting on a story in another newspaper (The Times). There is little difference between this and what bloggers and other web commentators do on a regular basis, yet it is precisely the kind of thing that newspaper publishers call “stealing”, and then put forth as the motivation for establishing their paywalls.
[3] Or at the very least, heavily subsidised.