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.