Is There A Future For Paid Online Newspaper Content?

The newspaper business in the US continues to flounder and gasp for revenue, with the news last week that the venerable Boston Globe is on the brink of closure. So to stop the rot, American newspapermen are rushing around like Cary Grant in His Girl Friday to come up with ways to make their industry profitable again. 

The Newspaper Association of American is convening in San Diego this week to sort it out, and apparently the hot topic is working out a way to charge for content online that works. Alan D. Mutter, writer of variously doom and ideas-laden blog Newsosaur, is saying that a number of “under-the-rader discussions” are going to go on between CEOs of media groups, away from the vanilla shop talk of the actual convention. As well as the talk about paying for content, there’s also going to be debate on how to get back the classified advertising market that was, pre-Craigslist, once so lucrative; how to tap some of the revenue from searches; and whether to start charging aggregators for content. Maybe it’s a good time for the HuffPost to be getting out of the aggregation business and funding investigative journalism, as long as they’re not just pouring their venture capital into it.

The head of Associated Press, Tom Curley, told the American Journalism Review: “The readers and viewers are going to have to pay more. Advertising is not there. Advertising will likely be contracting. So there has to be a shift.” Last month the Hearst group said it would start charging for at least some of its content, along with employing/exploiting citizen journalists, or “prominent citizens in our communities”, to provide content. And Rupert Murdoch, whose Wall Street Journal already charges for access to its juiciest content, said over the weekend at a cable TV conference: ”People reading news for free on the Web, that’s got to change”.

On a side note, Hearst and Murdoch are also both working on newspaper-sized e-readers to send their content to, which might just be overestimating massively the value placed by readers on large cumbersome formats.

Murdoch also waded into the aggregation debate, asking: “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright… not steal, but take”; Google recently started posting ads on its Google News service. The debate is whether the amount of traffic generated by Google searches is worth having it eat into your advertising yields – Gawker emphatically thinks so, the Guardian Media Group is less convinced, bringing up the issue to Lord Carter last week. As Floridian journalism professor Neil Reisner puts it, newspapers are now kicking themselves for “being sluts who’d put out for any old Google that came their way” – but surely to shun Google now would be condemning themselves to irrelevance.

But getting back to direct charging for content, and Bill Grueskin, former managing editor of WSJ.com, says: “slapping a subscription fee on an existing free news site is going nowhere”, arguing that purely online content that can’t be replicated in print is what needs to get paid for. And Martin Langeveld, of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, suggests that the maths just doesn’t add up – charging for content will drive viewing figures, and therefore advertising revenue, down to the point where the subscription fees won’t be enough to make up the shortfall; Nancy Wang at Media Cafe comes to a similar conclusion.

Not that the Boston Globe is going to be able to mull over these arguments at leisure – it’s got to find $20m in cuts, and fast. They’ll come from wage cuts, pension cuts, and the end of lifetime job guarantees. The existence of the latter of these is frankly laughable in an industry that has to stay young and lean, and I can’t see the unions having a strong case to make for them.

The paper is rolling out the schmaltz in a bid for create an upswing of sentimentality towards ink – this piece profiles the Bostonians lamenting the possible loss of their paper. “In Woburn every morning, retired maintenance man Ollie Gonsalves rises, gels back his hair, and heads to the Moore & Parker newsstand to buy his daily Globe”, write the staff in brushstrokes Norman Rockwell would have rejected as too sweet. “Fifth-grader Connor Locke piped up…’When Papi hit the 52 home runs, I framed that and I have it hanging on my wall’. His mother beamed. ‘Can’t frame the computer screen,’ she said.”

For those millions of us who use newspapers as a source of information and not as nostalgic decoration, the advent of the internet, and a variety of devices enabling it, is the future of news; and it’s looking unlikely that a tactic as prosaic as straight charging of the subscriber is going to ensure that future.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | April 6, 2009 3:17PM |