More leg room in Club Class journalism

Written by Jonathan Este

Murdoch as Machiavelli – it’s not the first time this trope has reared its head in the commentariat and I’ll bet your bottom dollar it won’t be the last.

The latest theory is that Murdoch’s enthusiasm for charging for content (let’s discard “pay wall” as misleading) is all about promoting his print products. He spent $1.3 billion a couple of year ago on three “cathedrals of print” (modern, worker-free printing presses) and all the bluster about having to charge for content online is a rearguard action to encourage more people to read the “dead-tree” option.

How do we monetise this? Attempts to do so with advertising have so far proven unprofitable, yet the cost of producing content has not suddenly dropped. Ergo, we must find a way of getting people to pay for what they consume.

Paid Content (which itself has some interesting ways of monetising content) had a story yesterday about a survey being conducted by Guardian News and Media as to readers’ views on a proposed “members’ club”.

“The Guardian is considering launching a members’ club, which will provide extra benefits in return for an annual or monthly fee. These benefits might include, for example, a welcome pack, exclusive content, live events, special offers from our partners and the opportunity to communicate with our journalists.”

Funnily enough an oped piece appeared the same day by former Times editor-turned Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins: comparing the “Guardian experience” to Glastonbury festival, which is a rather clever analogy but, methinks, wide of the mark.

Jenkins’ idea is that people will only pay for far more than a news experience – they want a whole lifestyle, a membership, a sense of belonging: “the ‘long-tail’ of live activity with the printed word as a mere core activity”.

It’s worth a look at the comments under this piece, as what people have to say is instructive in more ways than one (apart from a couple of posters who take the opportunity to tell Jenkins that they certainly wouldn’t pay for his work online…).

GNM’s focus has been sharpened recently by its most recent numbers which show that it lost Pounds 89.8 million in the year to March 29. (Read the group’s media release here). Caroline McCall, the group’s CEO, told theFIPP Worldwide Magazine Congress recently: 

“Realistically, there will be some parts of your website, (such as) MediaGuardian, lots of specialist areas where we do brilliantly, where we should think about how we charge for content that is not easy to replicate.” For McCall, “it’s crazy that we do so much to put content out there but we don’t get money for it.”

Murdoch’s comments (and, in Australia, the likes of John Hartigan at the Press Club last month) has really ignited the cash-for-clicks debate – which, incidentally, we were having in the Walkley Magazine some time ago, in case you missed it – download Jeff Jarvis and Alan Mutter on the subject).

In his wake have come a number of announcements from news organisations (the Boston Globe – part of the New York Times-owned New England Media Group – has announced it will charge readers to use it’s website www.Boston.com).

The pie-in-the-sky dreams of the “Googlejuice” evangelists (apologies Jeff) are just that – news costs money to produce and professional news costs professional rates. Of course, and this is where Jeff is absolutely right – the smart organisations are letting the experts – the broader community – in to inform the debate/discussion/call-it-what-you-will. But the initial shoe leather, foot-in-the-door, phone-heavy work will still need to be paid for, as will the curation of the discussion.

(Although, interestingly, the Guardian showed just how its audiences could add value by throwing the files of British MP’s expenses claims open to readers for them to scrutinise. Within a few days more than 20,000 people had visited the information, reviewing nearly 300,000 pages of information and breaking new stories.)

But it’s generally agreed that what news organisations hope to charge for will not be the regular daily news diet which will be offered free by many other sources (the ABC and BBC, for starters) and will continue to be aggregated into your lives by the likes of Yahoo and Google News, but “Premium” content – material: interviews, investigations, footage, etc, that is more in-depth, of greater targeted use to its audience and, obviously, exclusive to its creator.

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and the originator of the concept of the Long Tail, has an interesting take on it here: he calls it “finding the pet for your penguin”. Anderson’s is a “Freemium” hybrid.

“When he talks about pets for penguins, he is referring to the Disney's online game Club Penguin. This is free to play, but they have premium memberships that provide players with additional features. Based on the ideas of his new book Free, he says that newspapers must decide what they provide for free and what premium content and services that they can develop to make money.”

The Guardian “club” idea takes this one stage further: their additional features would appear to include goodwill – the idea of belonging to a community of like-minded people – almost an intellectual dating service. At any time, any place, you the “club” member might want to know what your community thinks of any given subject: whether Kerry O’Brien is a red menace or whether Malcolm Turnbull should pull his head in, for example, or whether the Australian selectors have rocks in their head if they leave Stuart Clark out of the starting 11 for the Oval test.

You don’t want to go on just any message board – you want to already know that you’ll have a fairly informed discussion with reasonably like-minded people – or at least people with the same level of interest in the topic as you.

News Ltd is trying this with The Punch and Fairfax is soon to launch its own version of this, National Times, but – from the perspective of employing journalists – Penbo’s venture is a bit light on to say the least. By all accounts it’s attracting a fair bit of traffic and directing a lot of that to the site, but my gut feel is that it is a long way away from being able to charge subscriptions and creating a “club” feel.

We’ll be talking a lot about this at our forthcoming forums, on August 21 in Perth and on August 24 in Adelaide. As ever with Alliance events, it’ll be a collaborative effort: the expertise in the room will not be confined to the speakers’ panels – we’re hoping to get our good ideas from the people who are motivated to turn up and spend an evening discussing this interesting subject.

The commercial media needs to take note of this. I’ve always banged on about the old top-down model of journalism becoming gradually obsolete as journalists begin to realise they are not the smartest guys in the room any more. What editors need to work out is that they are not the smartest guys in the newsrooms any more.

At least, they aren’t if they haven’t worked out that they are sitting in charge of an ideas factory, a workforce whose talent and enthusiasm they need to harness to bring in those paying audiences.

Oh, and one last thing: last I looked “premium”, meant offering something extra. Something extra means more work for journalists.

At last, some good news for us working stiffs!

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