Paywall papers versus open access

18-11-2009

by Ralph Averbuch

Some papers will start charging for online news but the press are divided.

No doubt there's lots of hand-wringing going on at News International/News Corp as its executives begin to realise that their dear leader is determined to take its newspaper titles behind a paywall and have the great unwashed, who've been used to getting news for free, cough up some cold hard cash for the privilege. Good luck! They'll certainly need it. Mind you, Rupert Murdoch didn't get to be one of the most powerful businessmen in media by calling it wrong. Yet going back to a micro-payment model is going to be very challenging indeed. If it wasn't already so ten years ago, without doubt the flow of news we get today is totally commoditised. Services such as Twitter have the potential for any one of us to "break" a story in 140 characters, often leaving the papers to mop up after with analysis and opinion rather than setting news agendas. Fact is, papers in the western world are losing the race to stay relevant. Even if the web had never happened, the demographic writing was already on the wall with fewer people regularly reading a daily paper each year - especially amongst younger adults. Whatever Murdoch's cronies do, that stark situation isn't about to change. So we're faced with two opposing camps. One hopes that pulling up the drawbridge on open access to news content will lead to people being willing to pay for entry. The other camp takes the opposite view, making content freely available and hoping to command better ad revenues from traffic. In UK terms this might be summed up as the Times v Guardian approach. The latter is not only open to all comers, it also has a form of creative commons allowing any third party to access all of its content. Of course, it's just possible that there is more than one path to online success for the press. Equally, both strategies may be doomed in the long-run. But it's a stark example of one organisation retrenching and trying to bend the web to its will, versus another which is attempting to embrace this new medium and make itself relevant to a new generation of readers, growing up in a world where the notion of paying for news is anathema. Given that the Irish Times dropped its pay wall in 2008, it will be interesting to see which way the rest of the Irish press will go.

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