What news do I pay for? I subscribe to the Economist, New Scientist and The Guardian Weekly. All are weekly niche magazines (one in a newspaper format) and two of them give access to all their archives when you have a paper subscription (Economist and New Scientist).
What news will I pay for in the future? If every newspaper website became a walled garden (unlikely), then I would probably go to the BBC for the headlines and make do with the weekly news I get from what I mentioned earlier, as well as specialist "news" sites, such as Hacker News, Slashdot etc. There is actually very little news which I am interested in "as it happens". Most of it I want with an accompanying analysis, which is why I subscribe to the weeklies.
What do I think the future will look like? Lots of specialist outfits like Hacker News, Arstechnica, profitable walled guardens like the Economist and New Scientist and free public sites: BBC, NPR and a ton of "free" (advertising powered) sites with marginal to no journalist staff. Maybe. There is most likely a business model or two in there somewhere which we haven't figured out yet which will surprise us all.
Paying for anything which Murdoch supplies? Hardly likely (unless he owns one of the above :). I didn't do before and I am not doing it now. Of course, I am not Joe Public.
I'm not sure about that. I think thinks like the WSJ will suffer greatly but his big audience, the Fox News crowd, will pay to get that slop they call news. The Fox News/Noecon relationship is a lifestyle now, not just a political idea. I can see a lot of those people paying for the one news source that they have based their reality on.
Actually, I think the opposite is true. People reading the WSJ find the news contained there within valuable enough to pay for it. People reading Fox News just need something to make them angry, of which there are hundreds if not thousands of acceptable sites ready and willing to to provide sufficient rage material for free.
>People reading the WSJ find the news contained there within valuable enough to pay for it.
I would disagree. I think that the people who would pay for the WSJ are already paying for it. I don't see why people who aren't paying for it now would start paying for it when there are so many other free news sites out there. Maybe they could hook up some subscribers with devices like Kindle, but I think the people who are currently browsing it for free will not see the value in paying for it. Just a thought.
>People reading Fox News just need something to make them angry, of which there are hundreds if not thousands of acceptable sites ready and willing to to provide sufficient rage material for free.
Good point. I don't know the level of dedication to Fox people like this have. Maybe they won't pay for it, maybe they'll go to who ever screams about gays and socialism the loudest.
Back to my original point, is there really that much information the WSJ has that other organizations don't? Couldn't your second argument apply to directly to counter your first?
Well, there's the Financial Times, but they already have a paywall.
Bloggers don't have as much clout in finance as they do elsewhere. Mainly because there are more security guards to kick them out and it costs a lot more to get into industry events. Also, if you're an insider and you blog the wrong thing, you can lose your job and get arrested.
Don't you think they have spent a lot of time thinking this through, consulting with experts, and debating internally whether its been a good decsion? At least I hope they did.
If there's a chance they could successfully pull off a system where visitors pay a few cents for a quality article, why wouldn't it make sense for them to do it?
Their business model is under threat from 'free' stuff and so their response is to do what worked in the past, close the gates and set up a toll booth. Only this time it won't work, there are 100's of little side roads now, and you no longer have to use the 'main' road to get the news you are looking for.
People used to be 'loyal' to their newspapers, that's why the payments rolled in. That loyalty is very low, as long as the writing is good I really don't care whether I'm reading my stuff in German, French, English or Dutch and from what newspaper or other outlet it comes. So many choices, it's a delight. The AP feed relaying to fill the newspapers was a clever idea to save some money at the time but in the long term it backfired, it meant that there was less reporting in general, not that the reporters that were freed up were used to go digging.
It's only a matter of time before google or some other large party will hire a bunch of reporters directly and gets them to make the missing element (quality editorial content) and with the trouble at the regular newspapers I'm thinking that it will be a buyers market when they do.
WSJ charges for articles, seems to be working ok for them. Same with the New Yorker and IIRC Financial Times(?). I wouldn't be quick to dismiss this option.
As for the Google Times option, I think it'll bring about more problems than solutions. You don't build a quality newspaper by "hiring a bunch of reporters". There's a lot of accumulated knowledge in places like the NYT or WSJ. What we see from the web - from leading "reporters" investing in the field they're supposedly covering to opinion pieces by Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey - is far from encouraging.
WSJ and FT are specialized news and analysis that cannot be obtained elsewhere. Unless everyone in the newspaper industry starts charging all at once, the pay walls for other news sites will effectively go away.
IMO, this sort of thing is ultimately inevitable, and I don't think that the Internet is the ultimate cause (it's an accelerant, at best) -- I think that it's been getting harder for newspapers to compete with the depth of coverage provided "for free"* by television news organizations.
* When's the last time you paid a bill to CNBC or CNN? I don't pay an explicit bill for CBC Newsworld -- it's included in my cable package.
The cable model is interesting. Perhaps such sites could work out deals with ISPs - you'd pay a few more bucks each month and in return get free account on WSJ, NYT etc.
The 'at the same time' is telling. That's collusion.
AFAIK that is an excellent way to get into trouble with the law, and if it isn't then it should be.
You are supposed to come up with your price independently and without 'backtalk' in the boardroom.
If two gas stations get caught doing this they'll end up in serious trouble, I don't see why it should be any different when you're running newspapers.
Yeah, he's aware of that.. "And when the Justice Department lawyers arrive, briefcases in hand, to ask why America’s two national newspapers did these things in concert [..] you can answer directly: We never talked. Not a word. We read some rant in the Columbia Journalism Review that made the paywall argument. Blame the messenger."
Check out the article - it's the same guy who created The Wire, he's not a bad writer :)
To tell two people to collude does not give them any right to do so claiming there was no communication between them, effectively there was. They both could check if the other party was holding up their end of the deal on their respective websites. I highly doubt a judge would fall for it.
It's clever though, that's for sure. But like most typical layman attempts at 'hacking' the court system it would probably fail. Judges are not nearly as stupid as people seem to take for granted.
Sure, he's not really serious about that. But I think it's not improbable that many publications will start charging around the same time. The competition factor is overrated, IMHO - people who really want to read the Times will pay even when the Post is free, just as raising the print price to $2 increased revenues even though it's freely available online.
"Don't you think they have spent a lot of time thinking this through, consulting with experts, and debating internally whether its been a good decsion?"
Having worked at a few large companies, it's more likely that some executive got scared, hired a few toadies to tell him what he wanted to hear, then put in place a "plan" that he'd already decided and that is doomed to failure.
Maybe it's just me, but I sometimes wonder why web advertising isn't better at supporting services. Print advertising is really lame. It just sits there on the page - no way to interact, no way for it to have animation or video, no way for it to be targeted toward the user's preferences. And yet those dumb ads have done well. Heck, web ads give the user an instant way to click through and act on the ad! Is it just that marketing people are slow on the uptake? Maybe (since there are no metrics) they believe that print ads are more effective than they are.
The problem with charging for news is that people on the web aren't going to be single source like they would with newspapers. It's unlikely that someone is going to say "I'm content with only one news website" and get a subscription to that single site. Rather, they want to pick and choose the articles they like from many sites. And so subscription pricing doesn't really work because if you charge $5/mo, news might be worth that to me, but I'm not going to pay that multiple times to multiple sites that I want to pick and choose from.
And if you decide to charge per article, well, how am I supposed to know if an article is any good before reading it? And once I've read it, I won't want to pay for it because I already have the information. That contrasts to a song heard on the radio that I might want to listen to many times.
And the web makes it easy for anyone to publish and to a wide audience. I doubt that you're going to get all your competitors to charge alongside you.
I think that the big issue is probably that radio/tv/print ads have been overestimated in their effectiveness or that marketing people don't understand the effectiveness of web ads. With metrics on how many clicks an ad got, one could simply surmise that only that number of people were affected by the ad. But those other ads effectively have a click rate of 0 since clicking isn't possible and yet it's assumed that they're effective. And with that miscalculation, they're only willing to pay small amounts for the ads.
"Heck, web ads give the user an instant way to click through and act on the ad"
And that is the problem. Because the ads in print just sit there, the only way to measure the effectiveness is in increase in sales. On the web however, the sales are web sales and the advertiser forgets completely that a customer might have seen the ad and decided to go to the shop instead. So it's advantage is its downfall aswell since it constrains the metric used to measure hence undervaluing the effectiveness of web advertising.
How long before someone in <insert non-EU or US country> creates a company, pays the $99 fee (or whatever he wants to charge), and then just re-publishes the articles for free on an AdSense-supported WordPress site? You can cry "copyright!" all day long but people/countries who don't care, don't care. And good luck convincing China to shut down a blog that is re-posting content.
Well, I think the publishers would feel very safe in regards to your idea if the country of choice is China. I think they would worry about someone in say Sweeden instead :P
What news will I pay for in the future? If every newspaper website became a walled garden (unlikely), then I would probably go to the BBC for the headlines and make do with the weekly news I get from what I mentioned earlier, as well as specialist "news" sites, such as Hacker News, Slashdot etc. There is actually very little news which I am interested in "as it happens". Most of it I want with an accompanying analysis, which is why I subscribe to the weeklies.
What do I think the future will look like? Lots of specialist outfits like Hacker News, Arstechnica, profitable walled guardens like the Economist and New Scientist and free public sites: BBC, NPR and a ton of "free" (advertising powered) sites with marginal to no journalist staff. Maybe. There is most likely a business model or two in there somewhere which we haven't figured out yet which will surprise us all.
Paying for anything which Murdoch supplies? Hardly likely (unless he owns one of the above :). I didn't do before and I am not doing it now. Of course, I am not Joe Public.