Handwriting already on the paywall?
Not that this is news to us, but it turns out the paywall dream may far fall short of what at least some not entirely obscure publishers hoped. According to a new report from the hardline, no-punches-pulled British telecommunications consultants Enders Analysis, paywalls will never be able to compensate for the death by a thousand bites that newspaper revenue streams continue to suffer:
… A newspaper pay wall subscriber is worth only a quarter to a third of a print buyer: even if every single print buyer is successfully converted to the pay wall, newspapers will still face a basic problem of scale. … Pay walls will not be able to compensate for lower revenue per reader by expanding the audience for paid news, due to the long term decline of circulation, free online news, 24-hour broadcast news and free-sheets. … Future change will be radical: publishers may need to consider producing a newspaper its loyal readers recognise and value with just 200 rather than 500 journalists …
At the same time, News Corporation/News International magnate Rupert Murdoch seems to be standing firm in his dedication to the paywalls recently erected around his English flagship broadsheets, the Times and Sunday Times, despite a raft of really bad news. Says the Independent:
Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, “We are just not advertising on it. If there’s no traffic on there, there’s no point in advertising on there.” Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges. “That was the same forecast they were giving us prior to registration and the paywall going up, so whether it’s a reflection on reality or not, I don’t know.”
He warns that newspaper organisations have less muscle in internet advertising campaigns than they do in print. “Online, we have far more options than just newspaper websites – it’s not a huge loss to anyone really. If we are considering using some newspaper websites, The Times is just not in consideration.”
So, Murdoch’s looking uncharacteristically willing to invest significant resources into a (so far, apparently) failing venture. Is this sheer entrepreneurial hubris, an unwillingness to admit a bad move? I doubt it. My guess is that the revenues and stature lost at the Times Online simply don’t add up to enough for Murdoch to pull the plug on the experiment. Time and page visits will tell.
The latest bad news
From USC Annenberg via Editor & Publisher:
Study: Newspapers Sink Below Internet and TV as Information Sources
“Newspapers continue to be seen as less important at their primary job — being sources of information – according to the latest edition of the nine-year-old Digital Future Project from the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.
“The study found that just 56% Internet users ranked newspapers as important or very important sources of information for them, down from 60% in 2008 — and below the Internet (78%) and television (68%).
“And while newspapers also regard themselves as being in the entertainment business, just 29% of users consider them as important sources of entertainment, down from 32% two years ago, and last among principal media.”
CNN drops AP
CNN.com may not be the first place I go to immerse myself in the familiar comforts of Associated Press stories, but still, this has to be seen as another blow to the venerable wire service.
For those of us who have spent semester after semester training students on how it’s Pa. (not PA, Penn., Penna, ad nauseam), we once again have yet another reason, perhaps, to add more asterisks to the teaching of newspaper style guide rules and another reason to teach the very historiography of style guides.
According to the Huffington Post:
The AP confirmed that the two news organizations differed on terms for licensing AP stories, photos, video and other content beyond the June 30 expiration of the existing contract. CNN has been an AP customer since the cable network launched in 1980.
AP and CNN officials would not comment on why the talks broke down or how much the expiring contract was worth. CNN spokesman Nigel Pritchard would only say that the terms AP was offering “did not fit our business model.”
“We will no longer use AP materials or services,” CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton told employees in an internal memo Monday. “The content we offer will be distinctive, compelling and, I am proud to say, our own.”
What do you think? Should CNN have stuck with AP, or dump it?
The Future of News and the Internet, OECD version
The Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development offers a 98-page report on “the global newspaper market and its evolution, with a particular view on its economics, the development of online news, related opportunities and challenges and policy approaches.”
Some OECD countries already stepped in to financially help the newspaper industry, while others are debating whether government suppaidort can support a diverse and independent local press.
“Given that almost all OECD countries are currently reflecting on how to approach these issues, this study is designed to provide a platform for further exchange on immediate and longer-term policy development,” the report’s introduction says.
Information: OECD examines the Future of News and the Internet. Full text: “The Future of News and the Internet” (pdf).
Among the report’s observations:
- About 20 out of 30 OECD countries face declining newspaper readership, especially among younger people.
- The largest declines are in the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Canada and Spain.
- Elsewhere, country-by-country and title-by-title data “currently do not lend themselves to make the case for ‘the death of the newspaper,’ in particular if non-OECD countries.”
- “In terms of time spent, Internet users report a large increase in reading online newspapers, but most online readership is more ad hoc, irregular and sporadic than print newspaper readership used to be. The way news is consumed is also radically different on line.”
Newspapers ‘strange survival’ in Economist
“Newspapers have escaped cataclysm by becoming leaner and more focused” according to The Economist‘s Newspapers: The strange survival of ink, a story rich in European examples.
But even in the U.S., it says, “some companies are now worth ten times as much as in the spring of 2009, although they remain far from pre-recession heights.”
(See the article for some interesting details on McClatchy and Gannett, including a report that more Gannett papers using USA Today material.)
“The survival of newspapers is by no means guaranteed,” the article concludes, after discussing business strategies that involve iPads and smartphones, more local news and sports, etc. Emphasis added below:
“They still face big structural obstacles: it remains unclear, for example, whether the young will pay for news in any form. But the recession brought out an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt. If newspapers can keep that up in better times, they may be able to contemplate more than mere survival.”
A paywall against humiliation?
The indispensable paidContent has an interesting story on a bit of apparent site traffic numerical jujitsu from the Murdoch empire as News International approaches the raising of a paywall in June, when the Times and Sunday Times will start costing online readers £2 a week:
… both Times Online and Sun Online have stopped publishing their user numbers through the ABC [circulation auditors] in the UK.
March monthly figures for UK newspaper sites were issued Thursday – but both Murdoch sites are absent.
ABC confirmed to paidContent:UK that it is still auditing the publisher’s traffic numbers – but it is keeping the figures private at News International’s request and, at present, publication is not due to resume next month.
This means it will be hard to see exactly how many readers Times Online will lose when it starts charging …
Since the the Times and Sunday Times still plan to use advertising, it’s perhaps not surprising that the corporation wants, in advance, to apply a layer of lipstick on what will surely be, in the short term at least, a pig in the spotlight.
The writing’s on the pay wall for News Corp.
Once again, Rupert Murdoch is sounding a lot like a media exec ready to play the hardest kind of hardball when it comes to protecting newspaper content. The “river of gold” offered by the news industry to search engines such as Google may soon run dry, he prophesies.
From a report on the Kalb Report by Britain’s Daily Telegraph (an important News Corp. competitor, it should be noted):
The News Corp. chief said “we’re going to stop people like Google and Microsoft and whoever from taking our stories for nothing.”
Search advertising had produced a “river of gold” for Google, he said, “but those words are being taken mostly from the newspapers. And I think they ought to stop it, the newspapers ought to stand up and make them do their own reporting or whatever.”
Mr Murdoch said he did not expect search engines would pay for access to newspapers. “We’ll be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that’s followed by a subscription form,” he said.
He dismissed concerns that readers used to getting news on the Internet for free would be reluctant to pay.
“I think when they’ve got nowhere else to go they’ll start paying,” he said.
(A side note: interesting that Mr. Murdoch refers to Google and Microsoft as “people.” Does the metonym tell us something about the bare-fisted, personal quality of his mercantile vision?)
A 2013 timeline for newspapers to go mobile
Clyde Bentley at the University of Missouri offers a timeline for “Mobile Newspaper Success”… The road to 2013: A timeline for newspapers.
Responding to a Gartner Research study that forecast mobile devices will replace PCs in Web access by 2013, Bentley built a timeline from the endpoint to the present.
Result: If you’re a “key editor” at a newspaper, you should get a smartphone this month, or you’re already playing catch-up.
By August-September, Clyde says, newspapers should be training their news and ad staff on “mobile potential,” if they want to stay on track with the Gartner deadline. Within a year, mobile reporters should be producing niche-market features for mobile customers. Clyde’s examples: “Smoke-break wraps, during-game scores, pre-commute weather.”
More on that, and my own dumb experience with smartphones, here:
Tell Clyde I’m on the road to Floyd with a Droid
Conference to mark launch legal service for digital news ventures
From the indispensable Nieman Journalism Lab:
A Harvard-based conference on online journalism and the law will also help inaugurate a new legal service ?called Online Media Legal Network (OMLN). The one-day symposium occurs on Friday April 9 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass..
The OMLN says it aims to connect “qualifying online journalism ventures and digital media creators with lawyers willing to provide legal services on a pro bono or reduced-fee basis.”
Sounds a bit like what state bar associations used to do for small community newspapers and struggling journalism grad students. My only slight concern comes from this sentence from the conference website: “[The OMLN] supports promising ventures and innovative thinkers in online and digital media by providing access to legal help that would otherwise be unavailable.” What will be deemed worthy of aid?
Times (UK) editor makes passionate case for paid content
OK, “passionate” in a studied, clipped Fleet Street sort of way, perhaps? But nonetheless, it does stir the heart to see the masterfully intelligent James Harding make the big case, and the use of video (also displayed on page one) seems telling.
Beginning in May, the Times and sister Sunday Times papers plan to charge readers a total of £2 a week (about $3) for the privilege of accessing the newly launched websites where both papers’ content will live.
(Long-time readers will recall that the Sunday Times used to charge, so this is a back to the future move, in a way.)
The Times isn’t, of course, the biggest-selling British daily newspaper (that honor goes to the torrid Sun, another Rupert Murdoch paper), but — having worked for several years at various News Corp. journals myself — its corporate culture is very aggressive. Murdoch plays to win. The relatively cheap subscription fee looks like classic News Corp. underpricing to me.
