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January 26, 2010
In his 2010 Hugh Cudlipp Lecture Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor-in-chief, makes some points about paywalls and the new digital journalism that make a lot of sense. You don't hear these kind of media insights and arguments from the Australian media --Fairfax or News Ltd.
He begins by looking at one business model of journalism --the one that says we must charge for all content online. It's the argument that says the age of free is over: we must now extract direct monetary return from the content we create in all digital forms. He says that this this leads onto two further questions.
The first is about 'open versus closed'. This is partly, but only partly, the same issue. If you universally make people pay for your content it follows that you are no longer open to the rest of the world, except at a cost. That might be the right direction in business terms, while simultaneously reducing access and influence in editorial terms. It removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.
The second issue the business model raises is the one of 'authority' versus 'involvement'. Or, more crudely, 'Us versus Them':
Here the tension is between a world in which journalists considered themselves – and were perhaps considered by others – special figures of authority. We had the information and the access; you didn't. You trusted us filter news and information and to prioritise it – and to pass it on accurately, fairly, readably and quickly. That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority.
He adds that last year the Guardian earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business. However, his commercial colleagues believe they would earn a fraction of that from any known pay wall model. The amounts earned don't justify choking off the growth in audience numbers through a walled garden.
The Guardian's growth strategy is to embrace digital, reinvent journalism, grow the digital audience and increase digital advertising. Rusbridger's take on this is about reinventing journalism in a digital world with its computer and phone screens that the digital revolution has bought into being. He accepts the argument that digital technology has helped to:
develop a generation of fierce independence; of emotional and intellectual openness; of inclusion; biased towards free expression and strong views; interested in innovation, used to immediacy; sensitive to/ suspicious of corporate interest; preoccupied with issues of authentication and trust – which includes having access to sources; interested in personalisation or customisation rather than one-size fits all; not dazzled by technology, but more concerned with functionality.
Rusbridger says that the Guardian is edging towards a model in which a mainstream news organisation can harness something of the web's power. It is not about replacing the skills and knowledge of journalists with user generated content. It is about experimenting with the balance of what we know, what we can do, with what they know, what they can do.
We are edging away from the binary sterility of the debate between mainstream media and new forms which were supposed to replace us. We feel as if we are edging towards a new world in which we bring important things to the table – editing; reporting; areas of expertise; access; a title, or brand, that people trust; ethical professional standards and an extremely large community of readers.
They are reaching towards the idea of a mutualised news organisation.
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That lecture is the most intelligent response I've seen from a news organisation. It goes several steps further than Mark Scott's answer, which doesn't acknowledge the usefulness of contributions from the public. I hope someone influential at the ABC reads it.