News International announced this morning that, from June, we punters will have to cough up £2 a week to read the Times and Sunday Times online – a cool £104 a year.
The sound you hear is bloggers choking on their breakfast cereal.
The move makes a lot of sense for News International. True, their online readership will plummet. But, unlike most bloggers, Murdoch’s willy-waving is based on the size of his bank balance, not his number of unique visitors. Online advertising, for everyone except Google, hasn’t proved to be the magical money-making machine we were promised, and there’s only so much a business can give away.
We might like to read our news online for free, but we’re also the first to complain about poor standards of journalism, the “churnalism” reprinting of press releases and all the rest of it. If we want more hard news, more investigations, more fact checking, more “proper” journalism, we have to pay for it.
But it presents a real challenge to bloggers. The vast majority of us don’t get paid for our online efforts, and have neither the time nor the money to be full-time journos. Look through most blogs and you’ll find a high proportion of the stories come from the online mainstream media, often quoting a paragraph or two and linking to the source.
Wednesday’s Lib Dem Voice, for example, had the Daily View plus two pieces based on stories from the Mirror. Yesterday had even more.
What will more pay sites mean?
Bloggers may find themselves biased towards the free-to-read media. Even if the bloggers subscribe to read the pay media, the inability to link to content in a way readers can view it will cause issues.
Might it lead to groups of bloggers working more closely together? That could be a way to collectively subscribe to papers and gain the resources for more original journalism. Lib Dem Voice is run by a group of volunteers who achieve far more together than we could just running our own personal blogs (though we all have those too). Between us, we might be able to fund the subscriptions.
The trend towards pay sites will continue. The companies that run them are businesses which need to make a profit, and free-to-view media websites cost more that they raise in revenue.
The nightmare vision is the blogosphere turning into an extended Have Your Say thread – inward looking, all sound and no light, all opinion and no fact.
But blogging is still in its infancy. Even the most popular blogs have a tiny readership compared to the mainstream media. If we can use this as an opportunity to up our game, we might look back on it as a positive development; one of the kicks we need if the blogosphere is to reach its true potential.
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11 Comments
The citizen-as-journalist thing was tried, and didn’t really work IMHO, with Indymedia – that’s great for opinion pieces and for reports on events, but less good for investigative journalism because that’s the sort of thing that takes time and money that people wouldn’t normally invest…
I don’t think bloggers trying to be journalists on the cheap is the way forwards, but however it progresses, bloggers need to be aware that the same problems journalists have will affect bloggers too. Bloggers chasing ratings and revenue will end up doing exactly the same as the mainstream media does; bloggers doing journalism on the cheap will hit much the same issues too.
(One possible exception is the greater ability for bloggers with a specialist sphere or knowledge, such as Mark Pack on election law or Ben Goldacre on medicine, to find a space).
This is superb news. The more obstacles Darth Murdoch puts up in front of people reading his poisonous literature the better.
When a newspaper supportive of my politics does this, then I’ll react.
In fact when a newspapers supportive of my politics exists, then I’ll react.
The price is set far too high, but that gives other papers the chance to undercut Murdoch and take away a lot of his potential ‘payees’.
£104 quid? Ha. Don’t be silly. I’ll only bother paying for it when all the others start charging.
Well, most of the Times’ website is not really worth paying for so I wouldn’t cough up that much.
In general I think there is a sensible compromise that would allow newspaper websites to make some money from readers without scaring away blog links: take micropayments (literally a few pence) to unlock articles. The technology exists, and if people are willing to pay 5-10p for a text message, won’t they be willing to pay about the same for a news article (especially an interview or investigative reporting)?
It is annoying that when I link to archived Economist articles (for example) there is no way to read them for other readers without subscribing unless they use the (one-off) 14-day free trail. Allowing articles behind a paywall to be read individually for a few pence shouldn’t cannibalise any other revenue – most website subscriptions are bundled with print subscriptions anyway.
As Iain says, “If we want more hard news, more investigations, more fact checking, more ‘proper’ journalism, we have to pay for it.” If I was not a subscriber I would certainly be willing to pay 10p for a good news article, such as pretty much anything in the Economist or quite a lot of the Guardian. But for micropayments for news to take off, a significant news website (or a stable, like a group of local papers) needs to stick its neck out and adopt it. If the Times is going behind a paywall anyway they might as well try it out. (After all, even the Times has some good stuff, like articles on libel and a series of excellent reports from Iran after the stolen election.)
I think my comment got stuck in the spam filter. Is two links too much?
the ft is only £50, despite costing £2 a day to buy…
Might the blogging community be underestimating its potential commercial negotiating position here?
Newspapers have three types of source for their stories: professionals – their own journalists (rather few of these around today)/ stringers/ press agencies; accidents – kiss and tell/whistleblowers/informants (whether sober or otherwise); and other people’s publications including blogs.
Paying for source material in the first two categories is a cost of doing business for them although occasionally they get lucky and a whistleblower or informant gives them a good story for free because that individual wants to get the matter out in the public domain. But the third category is free source material. Newspapers often re-use each other’s stories so I have always assumed that there is some sort of informal cross-licensing understanding in operation there. Bloggers have been happy to have their material re-used for a variety of reasons but if they are now to be charged for reading (and presumably more for linking to) newspaper stories, this may change.
When blogs refer to newspaper stories to comment on them (which can’t be charged for as it’s an exception to copyright) and linking to them (which can as it’s not) they are providing advertising for the original story in the paper. At present that is a cost- free benefit to the paper. Should it continue that way if the newspaper is receiving income from blog readers who read its story because the blogpost draws their attention to it?
In addition, bloggers feed stories to the newspapers so there must scope for for doing some kind of deal there. At the very least, on a one-off basis the story/lead could be offered on condition that the blogger is allowed to publish a link to a readable version of any story that is published. Stephen Tall’s co-operatives of bloggers could negotiate for a free sub in exchange for the use of blogposts and feeding stories over the year.
Although blogs are free for anyone to read – and that is a fundamental underpinning of their existence – it is possible to prohibit (i.e. put yourself in a position to charge for) the publication of blogposts or links to them by organisations that themselves charge for access. It’s not possible to charge for referring to a blogpost to comment on it. This may not represent a preferred route to the blogging community but it is a legal right that has some value in negotiations.
Micro-payments could, of course, help. A blog reader might well be prepared to pay a few pence to read an article that is the subject of the blog post whilst not wishing to pay an annual subscription for every newspaper. There might also be scope for some kind of micro-payment aggregator to charge an annual sub for blog readers to allow them to access any story that is linked to and to distribute the income to the newspapers, in a manner analogous to the public lending right levy for library books.
It would be a shame if the increased use of charging for news websites were to lead to a gulf growing between the blogging community and mainstream press when there are plenty of opportunities to maintain and increase cross-fertilisation.
The decision by News International to charge for access to their websites is a really interesting move. Meltwater applauds the innovation of new business models for online content. Everybody benefits from a thriving and successful global publishing sector; any move that can mitigate the financial challenges in the media sector is a positive.
Many publications – such as the Wall Street Journal for example – have already gone down this route and others are considering the same.
The ongoing challenge for publishers, in the aftermath of installing pay walls, will be to ensure their customers are aware of the valuable and compelling content being created by their journalists. This could very easily be content that readers would be more than happy to pay for, but which they might not even know exists. Getting the balance right between the availability of free content and access to paid-for content will be crucial.
As a truly global media monitoring company, Meltwater believes we can play a valuable role in this regard. We are already creating global awareness of restricted content behind login pages and pay walls for numerous media outlets such as the Financial Times. We promote and market their restricted content to a global audience of potential paying readers and thereby drive traffic and revenue for our partnering publishers.
Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (http://meltwater.com/en/who-we-are)