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May 11, 2009
Rupert Murdoch said recently that the days of free online content of News Corps' newspapers are about to end. He will shift to a payment model within a year. This is his response to the collapse in advertising revenues and increased competition from web-only rivals this year---newspapers (and magazines online) had to make money from readers as well as advertisers, given that ad revenues will not come back at same level.
Subscription schemes in this context, such as those offered by the Wall Street Journal Online, the Financial Times, and the AFR begin to look attractive for media corporations. Will it work for The Australian? The New York Times introduced Times Select in 2005, putting some popular columnists and archive content behind a subscription wall, but closed it in 2007. Putting a wall around content kept it out of the national conversation and devalued its brand.
I have doubts that The Australian has any content people would pay for since they do not offer a unique product. Or, in another way to put this, is The Australian able to ensure a greater differentiation in quality between print and web in order to justify the price premium? Not with the current product.
The mass media do have to get used to the idea that we consumers have been force fed advertising and we don't really like it. When I look at Foxtel in Australia I'm stunned---the bottom line is that consumers are being charged via subscription for advertising! My guess is that the owners of content rich sites will have to decide, do they want advertising or do they want subscribers? Trying to get both and rip off us consumers will not wash.
The news or entertainment industries will diminish their audience by charging, which in turn reduces advertising revenue. The Australian online is a shop window and it is free as a way of selling the site or the News Corp brand to you. The shop window entices you inside. But there has to be some good content inside, and for News Corp that means more than its standard conservative polemics.
Update
Clay Shirkey's Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable is the text to read in response to Murdoch's payment for digital content proposal. Shirkey says that the curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan:
“Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
He says that round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
He adds that many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
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Snap!
Takes the words right out of my mouth. Am hard pressed to bother with them now, they are so poor.
But to pay for them!
They should pay us.
Not fit for wiping budgie cages