Tag : publishing

On Thursday I took part in The Media Briefing’s debut event, Paywall Strategies 2011. The day was dedicated to exploring a variety of different approached to paid digital content and assessing the merits, weaknesses and underlying principles of each. 

I recently attended an ICA debate called Paywalls, Ebooks and the Death of Print. It wasn’t so much a debate about whether print was dying, but a discussion about how the institution of news could be saved, and who should save it.

The usual suspects here are industry, technology and philanthropy. But on this occasion, panelist André Schiffrin brought another contender to the table: government. Whoah now. Government?

At the start of this month I suggested that Rolling Stone’s McChrystal expose was the story of the year. I was wrong. Whistleblowing website Wikileaks’s release of more than 75,000 classified military documents — collectively referred to as the Afghanistan war logs — is now the story everyone is talking about, and it is unlikely this will change anytime soon.

A security breach/freeing of information (as you like) such as this is pretty much unprecedented, although many are comparing it to the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers (including DanielEllsberg, the man behind that leak).

Just as with the Pentagon Papers, the leak and the subsequent publication of previously classified information are just part of a complex knot of stories. Who leaked this? What do we make of what we read? What next for Afghanistan, for the US military and indeed for ISAF as a whole? — these are only the immediate questions.

A couple of weeks ago I had a little rant about the three things I think publishers need to do if they want to thrive in a beyond-print era. The survival of news media is a big issue right now, and so it should be — the quality reportage of news is critical to the health of our society.

In the time since posting my argument, I’ve spotted a few new developments I think are worth sharing. Unsurprisingly, they all have a lot to do with content and the contradiction of digital content: expensive to produce (or at least, the good stuff often is) but more often than not, free to consume. Highly valuable, then, but cursed with a changeable value.

Revisioning an economy around forces like these isn’t going to be easy, but I believe it can be done. Here’s what’s happening, and why I think it matters.

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.

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.

Last Tuesday night, I went to the preview for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition (aka the Oscars of the design world) at the Design Museum in Shad Thames.

(Photo credit: Luke Hayes, from the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year blog)

It was a fluorescent evening, buoyed up by free-flowing champagne and ebullient design typeslarging it in hats, big hairdo’s, bright lipstick and serious specs.

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?