You pays yer money, you wants yer choice

Written by Jonathan Este

In his regular column for MediaGuardian, Jeff Jarvis rubbishes Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that News Corporation intends to charge for its online news content, quoting Vivian Schiller, now of National Public Radio, formerly of the New York Times, saying charging for content is doomed to failure – she should know, she’s had close-up experience of one of those failures.

New York Times tried to hive off its comment and stick it behind a crude pay wall called TimesSelect. It was a dramatic albatross: according to Paid Content.org the subscription service had only 227,000 paid subscribers and cost the Times dearly in terms of advertising revenue from all those eyes it locked out.

At the time Schiller said: “This is what is really important—it did work. It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

As compared to not having a pay wall, she might have added. Here’s what she told Newsweek recently:

“I am a staunch believer that people will not in large numbers pay for news content online. It’s almost like there’s mass delusion going on in the industry—They’re saying we really really need it, that we didn’t put up a pay wall 15 years ago, so let’s do it now. In other words, they think that wanting it so badly will automatically actually change the behavior of the audience. The world doesn’t work that way. Frankly, if all the news organizations locked pinkies, and said we’re all going to put up a big fat pay wall, you know what, more traffic for us [NPR]. News is a commodity; I’m sorry to say.”

Three things occur (naively, perhaps). One is, how exclusive will these benefits be if the Grey Lady is looking to sell, say, a million subscriptions? Secondly, how much of the US$150 goes to paying for these add-ons rather than journalism. And, thirdly, can anyone give a tuppenny damn about a tour of the newsroom.

I think we have to take a long hard look at what news organisations consider “adding value” to news. Let’s not forget that, in the ABC – and, globally, in the BBC, audiences have a big, fat, credible and FREE news alternative. Most people want the news. It’s only that “fanatical five per cent” that might want the add-ons.

But I’m already getting the add-ons. Let’s see: my twin obsessions, the media and cricket. I get into work and have an exhaustive list of authoritative media blogs to read, almost all of them outside the mainstream press and all of them free. For my cricket fix I get cricinfo.com, which also includes a fat blog roll, most of which blogs are written by people who share my passion for the sport and have a damn site deeper knowledge than I (or, let’s be fair, a goodly portion of the commercial press’s pundits).

Were the entire commercial news media to retreat behind a pay wall, I could satisfy those urges without any problem at all.

So news organisations will have to work hard to think how they can add value to their core business in order to create something that will attract a significant paying audience.

It will have to be significant if it is to avoid what Jeff Jarvis describes as a “loss of Googlejuice” (doncha hate that word? Me too). But this is worth considering: when the NYT scrapped TimesSelect it referred to the “double-digit advertising growth … the scale and the power of the revenue that would come from that over time” to replace the subscriptions revenue and then some.”

Even given that online ad revenue is not what we might hope (yet…), if you the online dictum: “reach equals revenue”, then you screw with your reach at your own risk.

And, forgive me, it is hard to imagine journalists being the best arbiters of what has value in the news product. To us, it’s all valuable. Of course people should pay for it.

But being asked to pay for the chance for a one-on-one with a comment writer? Hmmm, given that most people who leave comments on comment pieces do so in order to abuse the crap out of them, I doubt you’ll find many people willing to pay for that pleasure (although Piers Akerman may yet prove me wrong).

There are a series of niches that a clued-in news organisation might look to exploit and not all of them sexy: education and health spring to mind. Imagine a localised blog that gives people a chance to really discuss schools (it would want to be very carefully moderated, of course).

When it comes to the chattering classes, schools and education are topics they really want to chatter about.

And one of the great puzzles in life is why Fairfax persists on keeping its hugely valuable Good Food Guide as a print only resource. Anyone who has gone online to find a decent restaurant only to be faced with the jungle of crappy review sites which have little or no credibility, would kill for the chance to centre around something like the Good Food Guide, to read credible reviews, add their own and rate restaurants.

These are both hyperlocal examples, of course. Which is where the greatest value may lie in selling online content – tailoring information to a specific socio-economic and geographically defined audience. It’s hard work and labour intensive. It won’t win you many Walkley Awards, but people can use it and if they can use it, they may pay for it.

The other side of the pay equation is this: can a news organisation appeal enough to its audiences that it becomes a de facto “club” that people are willing to pay for membership of? In a sense this depends on its understanding of social media. Once the contents of your website – your news and the ancillary content – become poles around which ebb and flow volumes of interaction from people who are talking to each other as much as you, then you might be in with a shout.

I don’t see this happening yet in Australia. If a newspaper used to be a city talking to itself, a good news website should be a community talking among its selves. So that rather than a wall to keep people out, it’s a club that you want to join in.

We’re not seeing too much evidence of that yet.

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