reality BYTES
By Adrian Weckler
Will paywalls for online newspapers work? Yes they will. Next month, British titles the Times and the Sunday Times will start charging for access to the online editions of their newspapers. The price will be £1 (€1.17) per day or £2 per week for access to both newspapers.
News International expects to lose at least 90 per cent of its online readership when the paywall comes into effect. But the company’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, believes that it is better to have one million paying subscribers than 15 million non-paying visitors.
In this, he is right: newspapers need money to produce content that is superior to freely available blogs, photos and news headlines .
The only reliable way to get that money, it seems, is to charge a subscription fee.
The question now is whether the Times has created online editions worth paying for? The initial answer seems to be yes. The daily edition has created a site that differs from its competitors in a couple of important ways.
First, it tackles its main features in more depth than usual. This includes more graphics, more photos and more how-it-happened timelines.
Secondly, it seems to have columnists, journalists and experts online at regular intervals to engage in live chats.
Lastly, it has committed itself to creating exclusive video content for a midmarket audience.
In other words, the site has more journalists, editors and effort going into it. This, surely, is a good thing. There is no word yet on how (or if) content from the Irish edition of the Sunday Times will be incorporated into the new format.
At present, newspaper websites are free. But few of them are compelling propositions.
This is not because the news on them is poor (which it isn’t). It is because newspapers cannot afford to man websites with prominent journalists and editors.
Without this extra element, newspaper websites do not offer a more compelling proposition than Twitter, Reddit or Digg, where ‘best of’ links can be swapped. And although news websites offer news and analysis, they don’t offer much by way of videos, interactive features or exclusive content. Increasingly, those are the things that make news websites stand out.
To date, most media coverage of the Times’s move has been negative. It ranges from dismissive remarks about Murdoch ‘not getting’ the internet, to bloggers saying that they will never pay for news content.
Those views have some credence: Murdoch has made a mess of MySpace.
And free access will always dominate paid access, where available. But his underlying logic for switching from a free model to a subscription model has merit. Quality research and polish need to be paid for.
The question now is whether Murdoch’s rivals will stick to their free news models, or follow him behind paywalls. Looking at the media industry, it is hard to see how they can resist the paywall route. Expect to see the Daily Telegraph – the Times’s main broadsheet rival – adopting the same strategy soon. Then the Daily Mail (which has 30 million daily website visitors).
If that happens, even trenchant critics of paywalls, such as the Guardian (visited by 35 million people online daily), will find it hard not to succumb.
Irish publishers have either indicated their intention to erect paywalls or have already done so. While executives from Independent News &Media have spoken about a change in industry thinking on this, the Irish News and some regional papers have already made the move to subscriptionbased models.
The Irish Times, which abandoned a blanket subscription model two years ago, has now re-introduced a subscription service for an ‘e-paper’.
Thomas Crosbie Holdings, which publishes The Sunday Business Post and the Irish Examiner, has not indicated a strategy on a paywall issue yet.
There is one factor that Irish newspapers will find difficult to deal with, in comparison with their British counterparts: the increasing role of the state broadcaster in creating a super-site.
The key features of RTE’s website – television and radio news reports, podcasts and a catch-up TV service – are paid for with licence-payer fees.
If a private sector rival finds away to create great content, RTE simply emulates it and outspends everyone else with its comparatively vast resources.
If this situation continues, any website operated by an Irish newspaper will be limited in its scope and investment.
