Oh Rupert Murdoch, how many cars do you have? How many sprawling Bentleys and Aston Martins? How many lavish estates do you call home? How big is your yacht? Which one? Ummm… I don’t know, the biggest one. How many private jets do you have? Could you lend me a tenner? No, I didn’t think you would. In fact, you might even charge me for using your bathroom. I’ll bet even your soap dispenser wouldn’t give me a pump of magnolia fresh unless I put 50p in it.
What is it with people these days? It must be the recession, but absolutely everyone seems to be wanting to grab your last penny. The most outrageous example I can find is Irish budget airline Ryanair’s proposals to charge for the toilets onboard back in April; proposals that appear to have been scrapped due to public outrage. Perhaps not as shocking as toilet terrorism, but equally as controversial are Rupert Murdoch’s recent attempts at holding online news hostage. Admittedly, the ransom is only one shiny pound coin, but it has still caused shockwaves amongst the media world, as there are grounded fears that this move to charge for online content will set the precedent for the future and that other news agencies will follow suit.
Everyone seems to be holding fire to see what the public response will be. Can Murdoch get away with the commodification of online news? Would it be a success? Well, the Times Online was taken under siege on 2nd of July this year and concurrently lost two thirds of its online traffic. I wonder which bright spark on the marketing team enjoyed a jump into a three figure salary for that slice of brilliance?
The thing is, the pay-to-subscribe model is ticking along nicely for some papers. The Financial Times in London and also the Australian Financial Review have both had an active, and indeed successful paywall for some time. FT Group Chief Executive John Ridding has acknowledged the success of his paper’s paywall, but conceded that charging for online was always going to be more welcome at a paper supporting such a niche interest. The FT’s readership can justify paying because they cannot source information at this level of specificity and quality anywhere else. Perhaps the reason that the paywall’s popularity has not skyrocketed at The Times is because it caters for a much more general interest. This sort of news can be sourced all over the place. Asking to pay for the content assumes a level of superiority. Can the Times really claim superiority when it is set against the online content of other broadsheets such as the Guardian?
It would seem that the good folk at Guardian Towers found the whole paywall drama laughable. The shockwave of a bleak future of paywall media does not even seem to have fazed them at all. (Perhaps Guardian Towers is one of those earthquake proof buildings; is there anything they haven’t thought of?) Following the release of the paywall, they published a highly amusing ‘letter’ welcoming all former Times Online readers who had been blocked out by the paywall. Certainly made me chuckle.
The idea of paying for online content has been courted by news agencies for a while now. In 2005 the New York Times released ‘Times Select,’ a paid subscription service providing more in depth journalism from celebrity and guest writers. Murdoch experimented with the ‘freemium’ approach last year with the Wall Street Journal. This offered basic online content for free but more in depth, ‘premium’ journalism at a surcharge. He confessed in an interview on Sky News that he was happy to have fewer visitors to the site as long as they were paying.
I think that Murdoch may well have got it wrong bulldozing the Times Online like Hitler in the Rhineland.
There was no warning, no tentative attempt at the freemium approach. The people of Great Britain were shocked. Morning lattes were spilled. Tremours were felt as far as Wales. The only efforts to ease people in gently were the special introductory offer of a pound for 30days, which cheapened the content anyway. Who wants bargain basement news? The idea of a paywall implies quality and notions of special offers only serve to contradict that.
Online news is renowned for being less regulated and less meticulous than that of print. It is not proofread or edited to the same extent, but I can’t say that this would apply to anything on a website that trades under the name of a good broadsheet. So what extra quality will the Times paywall offer us? Does anyone have any ideas? I certainly don’t.
The other problem with a paywall is that it potentially loses more casual viewers of news, who will just go and search it out elsewhere. There are so many other avenues where you can find news. A paywall will only work for hardcore fans. You wouldn’t subscribe to the paywall unless your allegiance to that news medium was absolutely no-compromise-sworn-to-secrecy-fight-to-the-death. Personally, I like to get my news from different sources as it gives a more well-rounded opinion of events. If you consider the demographic of who would be willing to subscribe to the paywall, it is also worth noting that this limits the breadth of commentary that will be generated from articles behind the paywall. The resultant readership may be more streamlined regarding class and background and therefore the online comment may be less diverse. People who have an allegiance to a certain paper would be of a similar mindset and would have a tendancy to agree with the political or ideological stance of their journalists. Murdoch is training up a readership of ‘yes’ men and women. Feedback would be much less democratic. Jesus, this is getting scarier by the minute.
Recent comments from Murdoch show that there is no sign of backing down. Surprise, surprise. The wall will not be toppled, but bricked up further. The implications for Australia are as yet unknown, although there are rumours that online division of The Australian may move to a ‘freemium’ website next year as an experiment. A recent article by Shane McLeod discussed a global survey by the Boston Consulting Group about which countries would be prepared to pay for online news. Australia came out bottom. I don’t blame you. I found another interesting article on the AFR website regarding Australia’s views on the paywall entitled ‘Mixed news for Murdoch’s paywall push.” Unfortunately, I will never know that outcome, as it was locked behind a paywall…….
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