Will the pay-wall finally kill-off our newspapers?

Everyone in the newspaper industry in particular and the media more generally seems to be obsessed with introducing a pay-wall: forcing consumers to pay to consume their content. I’m sure that this has been inspired by Rupert Murdoch — although I would suggest that collaborating to apply a pay-wall appears desperately crooked. Just a thought, chaps.

However there are other reasons why this is going to fail spectacularly. And no, I’m not talking about the fact that nearly all of the money Mr. Murdoch has realised on his foray into the UK newspaper scene comes from the physical properties that came with the companies: the man is making money out of newspapers however he does it, which is considerably better than most of his competitors. I’m talking about those great bastions of the left-of-centre establishment: the Guardian and the BBC.

Now I’m a huge fan of the BBC. Yes it has it’s institutional problems, as I cover here; problems quite separate from it’s content offering and mainly down to it’s inflated administration. The news in particular is very good. Some may argue that it has a liberal bias. I would say more correctly that whilst the institution itself has a liberal bias, the news is generally objective with a mildly pro-British agenda (and let’s face it: Nick Robinson was notoriously a Conservative).

The Guardian is not great, in my opinion, although I do like it’s cricket coverage. Mind you I read anything to do with cricket, so that’s not saying a lot … It does have a distinctive, reflexive, left-wing bias which I personally find more than a little bit tedious and unthinking from time to time; it indulges itself with more navel-gazing than most; and it continues to employ “names” inappropriately: can I just make it abundantly clear that social media has not been around long enough for anyone to truly be a “guru” yet, let alone a self-proclaimed guru (I’m looking at you here, Bunz and Klass: you are affronts to your actual profession). Yet despite its tendency to sound like a petulant teenager, in the business of reporting the news it still does a very good job.

Back to the pay-wall. Now unless you are offering a really distinctive content with real, immediate value (such as the FT), or you have a particular columnist who attracts huge numbers of readers come-what-may, I don’t see how you can compete with The Guardian or the BBC. People won’t pay for what they can get for free without an extremely good reason.

Arguably the newspapers collaborated in their own demise, making this content freely available. But many smaller, often more niche, sites survive and thrive with completely free content. What the newspapers have really done wrong is cling on to their antiquated, out-moded modi operandi. Declining circulations started well before they freed up their content online: newspapers, actual printed newspapers, have been dying since the introduction of radio and TV, let alone the internet — and yet at each time they never fundamentally changed their models to cope, just juiced the old one that extra tiny amount.

I won’t discount the pay-wall. It will eventually, inevitably, be implemented (but not immediately despite what this make-weight at The Guardian “reports”). Some people will do quite well out of it: organisations with a true value proposition and individual columnists with large followings in particular; the last re-doubts of free content more generally. Greg Hadfield was right on the money last Friday at journalism.co.uk. The old model is already dead; the pay-wall will merely hasten it’s final demise. And unfortunately a whole generation of journalists (particularly the real ones rather than the cosseted columnists) is in peril unless there is a huge change in the business of journalism.

Now fortunately there is a new model out there, which has the flexibility and scalability to cope with the pay-wall and offers a lot more for the individual journalists. It can even make money under a free model. But that is going to be saved for my next post.

Cover-it-Live: changing the world?

A lot of my followers on Twitter may have noticed that I’m plugging Cover-it-Live quite a lot. So: full disclosure: the company I work for has a strategic relationship with Cover-it-Live and I’m sort of in charge of the European Operation.

However this doesn’t detract from the fact that I think this product (and it’s imitators) is in the process of causing a massive paradigm shift in Broadcasting and Media, and possibly further. I just wanted to take a moment and explain why.

First there is the concept idea of “Live-blogging”. Using Cover-it-Live you can live-blog events and discussions. Big match on? Set up a live discussion, complete with goal flashes, polls, pictures and user comments. Similarly with huge events like the recent inability of the UK to deal with the bad weather — Sky News had a viewer window (with user commenting disabled) pulling in Tweets with useful information, and Le Monde used Cover-it-Live to cover the earthquake in Haiti.

The next idea is the concept of a panelist discussion. The best way to think of this is to imagine that when you run an event you are the producer of a talk radio show. You’re in the “studio” and receiving messages (Tweets, comments, etc.) from the “listeners”, and with you in the studio you have some “expert guests”. If you like a question from a listener, you read it out — which is to say, if you like a comment from a reader, you publish it. Your experts can then jump in and answer — which is to say, their comments have been configured to automatically publish. The Times does this very well, attracting top sponsors to monetise their events.

So far so good. But Cover-it-Live has a whole load of other features which move this beyond the world of the media. If you looked at the Le Monde event you will see that they’ve embedded in the live-stream photos and YouTube videos (you can see some screenshots in this gallery too). ESPN loves to throw in polls into their coverage of live events — who was the best player? — a great way to encourage participation.

And … you can now include live video from a webcam in your event.

Bridging the on-air/online gap: Sky News display live chat from the web

Personally I think that this constitutes a massive shift in broadcasting — providing the infrastructure for true web-casting. But there’s (even) more: Cover-it-Live is going to solve one of the biggest issues in the media world, the on-air/online gap. As you can see in the picture, using the Cover-it-Live XML feeds you can now display your web event on the TV. By it’s very nature this could be placed nearly anywhere — just ask your development team! Using the APIs you can equally suck in text messages, or mobile pictures, and display them in your feed. You can in fact manage a truly multi-media, multi-platform event all from one place.

Yeah, this is going to change the world.