It’s companies like Telstra that should be paying for content to be displayed on their Network – lots of luck. Newspapers and TV stations used to own the medium, now they don’t, and they themselves are are the program content on Telstra and Optus’ mass media channel.

It’s always been those that own the medium that command the lion share of the revenue – because there are significant barriers to entry and significant deep pockets involved. News Corp can’t win with such low barriers to entry. No wonder News owns a good part of Foxtel’s cable.

Even when registering only took about 20 seconds and was FREE, it proved a disastrous failure and was abandoned.

Do these same organisations (the Fairfax/News Ltd duopoly twins) now think they can try this again, but get people to PAY !?

It ain’t going to happen.

The only content people will pay for is the absolute highest-quality specialised content. That is the opposite to what News Ltd produces. They specialise in low-quality mass output regurgitated from wire copy and press releases.

For most of their tabloids they rely on mild titillation and celebrity entertainment news. People will never pay for that because there are so many sites out there run by individuals and fans that obsessively follow that field for free with greater devotion than any journo.

News Ltd have spent the past five years online chasing themselves downmarket, cutting locally-produced content, using homogenised network copy and relying on infotainment stories for hits.

Does Freudenstein really belive that any News Ltd publication in Australia – including the Australian – can shift into reverse and start producing exclusive high-quality material that people will buy ?

While simultaneously cutting costs ?

And competing with the always-free ABC ?

It will be very entertaining to watch them try.

Newspapers shouldn’t be offering everything for free like they currently do. They are shooting themselves in the foot. Hence, it can work if they adopt a freemium model – basic news free, premium content paid.

As Richard rightly puts it, there is a cost of producing the news. However, I disagree with his point of aggregation sites though. They do drive traffic to the original websites. I think the best examples are Digg, Huffington Post, Crickey, etc….

I blogged about this recently as well http://inspiredworlds.com/2009.....ournalism/

I have found: news.com.au, daily telegraph oz, telegraph uk, times uk, dailymail uk, various other science and news sites. This is an example of a press release being sent out and being picked up by the news sites.

If news ltd started charging I could still find this article elsewhere. (Unless the content News Ltd were offering was really that good? is it? Can it be?) Based on what they currently blurge out – I wouldnt lose any sleep if they closed down their free sites – I will simply go elsewhere…

You comment that tomorrow less people will buy a newspaper than today and it was less than yesterday. I agree with the reading of the market – and that is what concerns me regarding journalism per se. However, may I add the corollary to that statement. The number of people who bought online news content today is the same as yesterday’s and the same as tomorrow’s – none. (Well, virtually none or at least at an unsustainable level). What Freudy is pointing towards is the day when “none” becomes “some” then it becomes “lots” then it becomes “most” then it becomes “all”.

The trick as someone pointed out is how do you charge for it and recoup the money – PayPal? While it is daunting it is not impossible. I recall earlier in the year when the state government abolished toll booths and made everyone get an ETag. If you wanted to use the Harbour Bridge or a toll road you had to set up an account, deposit some funds into it, hook it up to a bank account so the ETag account could be automatically topped up, and away you go. Conceptually, there is no reason why if we can do this for our highways why can’t we do it for our “information superhighway” (sorry for resurrecting such a ’90s term). All I can say is, please don’t let the RTA get involved!

Publishers rely so heavily on advertising revnue, if they were to make people pay when they can still get content elsewhere, they would loose traffic… no traffic means no one to advertise to. Without anyone to advertise to there’s no advertisers and no advertises equals no revenue…

Unless the move was industry wide and people had no option but to get their news from a paid source, then this model will be very short lived.

JD

Fraudenstein can talk a good game now, as it is exactly what Rupert wants to hear. But I doubt he will be standing so tall after a month or two of such an experiment.

I reckon most of the population are of the belief they are actually paying for content online …

So to answer your question as to what will change. The number of people buying newspapers will decrease over time as peoples news consumption habits change. It’s a cultural change between age groups as well as a technological change. Thenumber of peole paying for newspapers today is less than yesterday and will be less again tomorrow. This equates to a broken/soon to be broken business model. A small percentage of people will continue to buy newspapers but eventually this will become a loss leading part of the business for the newspapers as we know them. They will stick around in the retail channel for a long time to come because newsagencys are a great marketing vehicle. The ambient advertising for your online brands that the newspaper distribution channel provides is invaluable to publishers and is something that they will not be willing to let go of lightly. They will keep doing it until the marketing value is less than the losses incurred on the dead tree product. That is some time away yet. When that day arrives you simply won’t be able to go into a newsagency and purchase a paper.

Newspapers realise this and they want to get on the font foot by trying to make some money out of this internet mularkey. It can be done, but it requires a different form of journalism.

That journalism is more meaningful and investigative. There’s too much content out there at the moment, and the internet doubles in size every six months. So the need that is coming through is one of editorship. I will pay, not for the news, but what’s happening BEHIND the news.

That sort of content is valuable, and as everyone has pointed out, that is not the sort of information that news ltd is actually any good at producing. Basically, the copy that these newsrooms produce at the moment is simply not of good enough quality for hiding behind a pay wall. It is press release driven and starved of editorial funding. Tabloid journalism is a numbers game. The more hysterical and the more common your appeal the more people buy your product. That is the antithesis of where the internet is heading.

It’s chicken and egg stuff, because news have to firstly convince us that they have content worth paying for before they will get consumers paying for it.

And don’t even get me started on how advertisers online are not prepared to pay a reasonable amount for the right online reader……..

Sorry. Rant over.

In advance ! ( A model where I take you money today, and p[rovide the service inthe future, the best model!)

I recall going to the shop and paying for the newspaper this morning?
Why is that going to change, exactly?

Nick

Now, if through time I am unable to read decent, trustworthy, informative journalism for free, then I will have to start paying for it…

The internet is currently free to use, minus the broadband fee.

Should individual publishers charge for their sites or will a cable tv style model emerge for the net? Look at the Fox TV model. Could this exist for the internet? Could it be combined with the internet? Cable Tv and access to broadband can surely all be delivered together…?

Something along the lines of:

Bronze package:
$60 a month
Major domestic news websites
Classified models (realestate, Drive…)
Search engines
Social media Australia only (Facebook and Twitter Australia.)
Australia only internet search

Silver:
$80 a month
As for Bronze plus:
Social media sites Aus, US, Europe networks
International news sites (BBC, CNN)
Business sites, such as Mumbrella
Educational sites
Wikipedia
Youtube standard
Australia / US / Europe internet search

Gold:
$120 dollars a month
As above
Youtube Premium
Cable TV
Social media worldwide
Worldwide internet search

Add ons:
Adult
Gambling
Mainstream Sport (EPL, NBL, Cricket, Rugby, NBA)

Rather than individual publishers charging for content will we see subscriptions to the internet based on access to certain networks / regions?

News, on the other hand is ubiquitous. And anything that ANY commercial organisation does will be done for free by the ABC. People won’t pay for News Ltd’s view of the victorian bushfires. They will go to the ABC. It will be well produced, come form a trusted brand, and be deliverable across multiple platforms becuase they are producing video. And at the end of the day, everything is moving to video, and this is not the domain of a newspaper hack. It’s a skill they can learn over time. Granted.

The itunes model is not realistic either. Unless ALL commercial organisations got together globally and created the one interface. Apple may have the power to do this, but that’s about it.

People WILL pay for compelling content. The itunes model proves it. But what they are paying for is not and never will be news.