Tag : paywall

Is anyone visiting times.co.uk?* Never mind that, is anyone still buying the newspaper? Media Week reports today that in August The Times newspaper circulation fell by 1.7%, going below 500,000 for the first time and confounding News International executives’ expectations that by putting thetimes.co.uk behind a paywall they would protect print circulation.

The Times management view seems to fly in the face of common sense. Different channels promote each other and, whatever the reason for the circulation fall (The Guardian fell too, by 1.85%), making times.co.uk subscription-only won’t have helped print sales.

It’s hard to call the paywall a failure when charging for something that others give away free resembles nothing so much as suicide. So how close to death is thetimes.co.uk?

Two weeks ago, some colleagues and I attended a Frontline Club talk on apps, paywalls and the future of journalism (for a recap, see William Owen’s excellent post). I found the experience very interesting but also very frustrating. I should say up front that this post is deliberately provocative: I am heartsick at the state of the news industry (one I respect and value to no end) and I want to do something about it — or at least start a discussion that does.

I did a quick poll via Twitter and email last week to see what sites, services and apps some of the people I know are using in their daily lives. These are of course likely to change as more and more services make their appearance (or, as I sometimes wickedly dream in the case of Facebook, slowly die), but for now I notice some clear trends:

News sites will continue to be a key source of information, even as print fights for survival

BBC News, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Dallas Morning News, Al Jazeera, News24, the Daily Mail and the Sun were the most commonly visited sites amongst respondents to my poll, with the BBC and Guardian clearly leading the pack. Smaller, more local sites still have their audience amongst people who have an affiliation to those areas. News sites found a mention by all respondents, so whatever happens to print magazines, their digital avatars are here to stay. As the Times prepares to go behind a paywall, it will be interesting to see how they respond to the changes in the behaviour of their audience – something that is bound to happen.

My first trip to the Frontline Club last night (thanks, @saradotdub) was rewarded with a lively and contentious debate on the future of newspapers featuring The Times digital director, Gurtej Sandhu, enduring a severe cross-examination on Murdoch’s paywall strategy. It came from all sides: the Chair (the subtle and persistent Steve Hewlett) fellow panel members and the floor.

My takeaway was that the discussion highlighted three fallacies that still govern much newspaper thinking.

Fallacy Number One is that the internet is free because of a mix of habit and a spurious moral right, and that if you can change habits and challenge morality we’ll go back to paying for content.

I’ve been meaning to write a response to William’s blog post of a few weeks ago about the news that some publishers (including Rupert Murdoch) are preparing to start charging for some of their content. I agree with William that people will be unlikely to buy a subscription to, for example, The Sun or Times Online but I’m not sure that is what is being proposed.

As William says in his blog post:

I don’t buy my internet news in a newspaper, I pick it out from a broad and fast-moving stream of fragments and favourites and recommendations garnered from twitter, blogs, feeds and aggregators and it’s all free. I might want one little piece of the Guardian one day, two little pieces of the Times the next, I don’t want either all the time so why should I buy 12 month’s worth?

New Media Age reports that ‘Times Online and theSun.co.uk are likely to start charging for content after News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch ‘indicated such a model could be in place within a year’.

And The Guardian is considering charging users to access specialist areas of its site to counter falling ad revenues.

(I’ll give you a link to the stories, here and here, but with sweet irony N.M.A. has a subscription-only model so you may not be able to read them.)

No surprises here. Their backs to the wall, display advertising collapsing under the weight of social media, traditional news organisations are retreating to a familiar industrial-era mechanism. Copyright, subscription, advertising: they’ve worked for 200 years or more, why won’t they work now?