Nobody will be surprised to hear that The Times, News Corp’s UK flagship, is looking at ways of implementing the pay scheme scenario. They might be surprised that it’s actually two schemes, subscriptions and a prepaid fee for 24 hour slots version.
The Times editor, James Harding, started by refuting the “pay per article” theory. He doesn’t believe in the model, understandably, which has been a crock in many news publications for years. Harding also doesn’t think that a “what sells” approach is good for journalistic quality, nice to know, coming from a group which sells exactly that in other news sources.
Other News Corp services are looking at different models.
The Sydney Morning Herald:
A spokesman for News's online arm, News Digital Media, said: "We have no plans to start charging for content in the first quarter of next year. The pricing model discussed in the United Kingdom is not necessarily what we will be doing here. We have yet to finalise our plans.''
The fact is that what works for the
Wall Street Journal may not work for other forms of news, particularly general news. WSJ includes a lot of business subscriptions, not user-pays scenarios.
The rest of the news industry has been less than forthcoming about its plans. This is pretty understandable in view of the obvious lack of enthusiasm from users, and the skepticism of the industry.
Rupert Murdoch is no fool. The pay for news scheme is transparently a cashflow move in an industry which is getting severely starved of cash. There’s nobody on Earth who can tell Murdoch a thing about cashflow in news media. It’s unlikely he’s even proposed this scheme without doing the number crunching.
Strictly avoiding the “disparagement on principle” approach to this problem, Murdoch should get some credit for not only facing the issue, but giving it a much higher profile, and signaling what will be a huge paradigm shift in news media, whatever happens.
Everybody else has been doing bookkeeping, not saying much of note. The otherwise total lack of ideas and leadership is a real definition of something, and it’s not pleasant to see a whole industry sinking like a toy boat in a bathtub without even managing a coherent whimper.
There’s an element of implied desperation, however, in this whole scenario. It’s no news (excuse pun) even to people under rocks that the expiry date on standard news media business models is deader than the dinosaurs.
Most of us in online news media have serious doubts about whether this has any chance of getting off the ground:
Ø Can a take it or leave it subscription model work for general news?
Ø How is a prepaid system going to work?
Ø Will prepaid take off?
Ø How do you structure a working, profitable revenue base, without knowing what the user uptake is likely to be?
Ø What are the parameters for revenue to keep these various news entities viable?
Ø What level of consumer resistance will constitute a make or break?
There’s an alternative scenario, equally vague in its way, but perhaps viable. This is a purely sales and marketing approach to the problems:
Ø Look for new revenue streams from new media products. Any major news site could operate like a version of Amazon, and the price structures are built in.
Ø Get those dismal online ads working as paying propositions by upgrading their pitiful content standards and making them worth clicking. The common wisdom is that online ads don’t pay their way for sites, and it’s about time they did.
Ø Adapt the prepaid idea to specific products. (like “download every Page 3 girl in
The Sun for a ₤5, etc.)
Ø Use the extremely valuable archives of news media as a full-on commercial resource. (This is one of News Corp’s big, apparently unrealized, assets. Like Fox, it’s sitting on a huge archival inventory.
The Times alone would be invaluable to practically every information medium on Earth as a working database for research. This could realistically be done on a subscription basis, particularly as an alternative to the “pay per article” method.)
Ø Use social sites as access points for news sites. It’s been happening in one form or another for years, but not in a meaningful commercial sense. Dovetail that with buyable, interesting products of whatever kind, and you’ve got a major sales schematic.
Ø Kill off the print segments that aren’t paying. Staff retention could be easily managed, putting trained people who speak the language into the paying news streams and avoiding training costs.
Ø Writeoffs for obsolete media should be worth something, and it’s quite possible that the current global political administrations will be prepared to recognize the legitimate need for business model reform to work efficiently, without cash constraints.
The fact is that a fragmented, cash-strapped news media is one of the reasons for the appalling standards of “commercial” news materials and huge job losses. This is all about revenue, looking for cashflow, and not finding it.
That’s what’s been slaughtering the new generation of journalists, and it’s been suffocating the evolution of mainstream news media in the process.
Something has to be done right, or news as the world knows it is in for a grim reality check.
