A discussion yesterday with some of the Cardiff postgraduate journalism students reminded me of one of the elements I think is missing from the paywall discussion: a really deep examination of exactly what people really paid for when they bought a print newspaper or magazine.
The reflexive journalistic answer is "news" as, after all, the clue is in the name "newspaper". My contention, though, is that we journalists have a bias towards the news element of the publication that our readers do not share. We got into journalism to "do news". They were buying a mix of news, features, comments, comics and crosswords that added up to a valuable package of information and entertainment in one handy portable product. And the cheaper bits of the paper to produce cross-subsidised the more expensive bits (ie: news). Oh, and the advertising paid for more of it than the cover price did...
So, in essence, we never really charged people for news. It was just part of a wider offer. And this is a point Google CEO Eric Schmidt has taken in an article in the Wall Street Journal:
The reflexive journalistic answer is "news" as, after all, the clue is in the name "newspaper". My contention, though, is that we journalists have a bias towards the news element of the publication that our readers do not share. We got into journalism to "do news". They were buying a mix of news, features, comments, comics and crosswords that added up to a valuable package of information and entertainment in one handy portable product. And the cheaper bits of the paper to produce cross-subsidised the more expensive bits (ie: news). Oh, and the advertising paid for more of it than the cover price did...
So, in essence, we never really charged people for news. It was just part of a wider offer. And this is a point Google CEO Eric Schmidt has taken in an article in the Wall Street Journal:
Now the Internet has broken down the entire news package with articles read individually, reached from a blog or search engine, and abandoned if there is no good reason to hang around once the story is finished. It's what we have come to call internally the atomic unit of consumption.To summarise: the internet does not support the old business model that financed the printed package of journalism.
Painful as this is to newspapers and magazines, the pressures on their ad revenue from the Internet is causing even greater damage. The choice facing advertisers targeting consumers in San Francisco was once between an ad in the Chronicle or Examiner. Then came Craigslist, making it possible to get local classifieds for free, followed by Ebay and specialist Web sites. Now search engines like Google connect advertisers directly with consumers looking for what they sell.
The problem we have to face up to is that just sticking a paywall
around what we used to do will not solve our problems on its own (and by decreasing page views, may harm ad revenue and make things worse.... ) We actually have
to re-evaluate what we do from the ground up and separate those things
that were an inherent quality of print from those that are an inherent
quality of journalism. (Hint: if your job has "news" or "features" in
the title, you're still defined by print.)
Some of our most sacred cows are due for the slaughter, I suspect. I find this post by Chris Alden, now CEO of blogging platform compny Six Apart, but formerly the guy behind Red Herring magazine, compelling in the context of this discussion:
Some of our most sacred cows are due for the slaughter, I suspect. I find this post by Chris Alden, now CEO of blogging platform compny Six Apart, but formerly the guy behind Red Herring magazine, compelling in the context of this discussion:
I think hiding behind "expert" quotes is one of the bad habits of professional journalism and ranks up there with "anecdotes" as one of the most abused methods for injecting a story bias. A story bias is when the writer has the story concept first, and then gets the anecdotes, quotes, and statistics to make the case. The bias can be left or right, up or down, but usually it's in favor of the salacious or exciting story, and against the dull "nothing to see here" story which is more often than not the reality. Even those journalists that can resist an ideological bias often have a hard time resisting a story bias -- because without a story they don't have a job. It's an inherent conflict.The sobering truth is that journalists no longer have anything near a monopoly on access to publishing tools. We can no longer define ourselves by the narrow information channel, the page count and the lead story. The internet has destroyed the existing structure of our profession and we need to find a new one. And the reflexive habits of our profession, shaped by the need to produce a package, need to pass away with our old business model.
