Media
Paywall: Is it the end for Rupe?
Extracts …
From June, the new sites… will be available for a charge of £1 for a day’s access or £2 for a week’s subscription. Payment will give customers access to both sites. — News Corporation Press Release, 26th March, 2010.
Marc Frons: To put all your content behind a paywall? To remove it from search engines? To remove it from the blogosphere? Yeah, I think that would be fairly suicidal to your business.
Here at home, the first News Ltd website to start charging for access is likely to be The Australian’s. Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell says it won’t be following the example of The Times in Britain.
Instead it’ll model itself on the Wall Street Journal, which has one of the most lucrative newspaper websites in the world.
You have to pay to get complete access, but a lot of general news is free:
Frederic Filloux: If you take a 25 years old person right now he or she won’t want to pay for news whatsoever. I mean the idea of having to pay for news for a young person is just stupid. But on the other hand if you take the more senior audience which is going to be more affluent, more older and more educated, this segment of audience will be willing to pay. Unfortunately it will represent a niche market versus the previous bulk market it was 20 years ago… the best informed people will be elderly, affluent, educated people. That’s it.
Jonathan Holmes: So basically, a sort of class-based news system, is that what you’re saying?
Frederic Filloux: A total class-based system, yes.
Well, you could argue that there’s nothing new in that. Quality news, investigative journalism and the like, has always been aimed at an educated elite. Its future, many hope and believe, lies not in traditional websites, but in applications specially designed for products like the tablet computer.
At the unveiling of Apple’s iPad earlier this year, The New York Times demonstrated an app it had been working on for just three weeks:
“From the front page you can easily flip through sections, tap into articles, or we can skip ahead to my favourite sections to see today’s latest stories.
— Apple launch of the iPad, February, 2010”
But Frederic Filloux doesn’t believe that either paywalls or iPads can save the traditional mainstream newsroom, employing hundreds of professional journalists.
“Frederic Filloux: Yes, I think the era of big news cathedral is over and we will have hard time to actually support good quality journalism which is an issue for democracy itself.
— Media Watch interview with Frederic Filloux (Media Commentator), 18th February, 2010”
Chris Mitchell, on the other hand, is an optimist.
An electronic newspaper, he points out, will be far cheaper to produce than the hard copy version.
“Chris Mitchell: When you remove the fixed costs in newspapers, they become much more viable. So if you think of a newspaper without paper and ink and petrol and trucks, you’re taking out between 60 and 70 per cent of the cost base…. But I guess my view is that the core of the business is your ability to dream up ideas to create news – the things that we chase each day. We sit here every morning and we have an hour-long conference and we decide ‘This is something we’re going to allocate a lot of resources to’. And I think that the core of the newspaper that is involved in that will continue to be involved in that. Because I think that is the thing that will create the uniqueness for us whatever the mode of content delivery.
— Media Watch interview with Chris Mitchell (Editor-in-Chief, The Australian), 31st March, 2010”