News Limited: We’re talking to bloggers about paywalls because their influence matters
News Limited will next week continue its paywall evangelising with a live streamed debate aimed at making the case for its digital subscriptiuon strategy.
The move comes as the Herald Sun moves to a freemium – a mixture of free content and paid premium content – from Monday. It folows in the footprints of The Australian which took the same route last last year.
The company has updated its Future Of Journalism discussion site with articles and videos and last week conducted blogger briefings.
It also did the same before The Australian launched its paywall.
Stephen Browning, director of communications for News Limited, told Mumbrella: “The reason why we decided to host dedicated briefing and discussion sessions with bloggers was simple – they are important, influential, voices. They attract large audiences who listen to what they say and trust their judgement. So, increasingly, we are engaging with them in exactly the same way we would traditional media journalists – briefing over the phone or in person, giving press releases in advance, inviting them to events and so on.”
PR agency Edelman has been advising News Limited on the project.
Browning added: “In the case of digital subscriptions there was another important nuance. We know that digital natives are less likely to become online news subscribers. They get their news from multiple sources – traditional news sources, social media, through RSS feeds and so on – often aggregating for themselves through FlipBook or Zite or the like. So this group really isn’t our target market. But it was important to us that they understood that there are millions of people out there who don’t have the time, inclination or expertise to do this and are quite willing to pay for a single trusted source to deliver relevant news to them wherever and whenever they want it, ie across online, tablet and mobile.
“So one of our hopes from the briefings was that when the bloggers wrote about digital subscriptions, even if they wrote ‘I will never pay for news’ they would at least acknowledge that there was a large audience out there who will. To that end we’ve been very successful.”
Next week sees the company stage its “Pixels & Ink” debate in Melbourne, chaired by Edelman’s New York-based EVP of global strategy and insights Steve Rubel. Panellists include Herald & Weekly Times editor-in-chief Phil Gardner, News Limited editorial director Campbell Reid, Y&R brands CEO Russel Howcroft and RMIT journalism lecturer Renee Barnes.
The debate will also be live video streamed. The company is promoting the hashtag #heraldsunfoj
Among the online coverage generated by the project was on Australian Anthill.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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The Australian paywall has made zero difference to me reading the site. I just paste the headline into google and click through! Herald-Sun should be the same.
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The statement “there are millions of people out there who don’t have the time, inclination or expertise to do this and are quite willing to pay for a single trusted source to deliver relevant news to them wherever and whenever they want it” is one of the more contentious public statements I’ve seen.
The idea that Australians are “quite willing to pay” is pretty hard to justify. First of all, I think you’d be hard pressed to find many Australians (let alone millions) who regard the quality of media in this country as worthy of their hard earned. I know the “freemium” argument suggests that with the improved revenues there should be improved content – but the Australian pay wall has been up a long time now and we still haven’t seen them deliver anything more in terms of quality or quantity over the old free model. What reassurance is there from News that they will do it any different in the near future. Also, what suggestion is there that consumers will be willing to trust them to give them good value given the old “once bitten twice shy” principle of sales?
The concept of a “single trusted source” is if anything, even more estranged from reality. To be frank the trust in the mainstream media died years ago and in recent times the mainstream print and broadcast media have been doing a remarkably good job of beating up its corpse. I think its fair to say that for John everyman (and even more so Jane everywoman) trust is gone and it ain’t coming back anytime soon. Its going to take decades to win the trust back methinks, and I suspect the MSN doesn’t actually have the inclination to make a real effort to get it back either.
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cheapskate! no i don’t mean it – problem is we’re all spoilt as we get stuff free, but at some point (already now perhaps) quality will be affected.
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@ Hugo – you’re right to challenge that quote with regards to the fact that most Aussies won’t pay: 91% don’t intend to in fact, according to a recent report by KPMG:
http://www.theaustralian.com.a.....6254711826
Another example of ‘Cargo Cult’ mentality from newspaper publishers. There’s always something that will act as their ‘saviour’. Paywalls are just the latest incarnation.
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If you couldn’t access that link behind The Oz’s paywall, no matter.
Try:
http://www.kpmg.com/AU/en/Issu.....estyle.pdf
Or:
http://www.kpmg.com/AU/en/Issu.....estyle.pdf
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Having a firewall because people are willing to pay is akin to a scam artist selling pirated movies because people are willing to pay.
“We’re happy to exploit dumb people” is the message I get from Browning. He does have a point though – anyone who believes that News Ltd is a ‘trusted source’ you can rely on for all your news is clearly quite thick.
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Hi Craig,
When scam artists sell pirated movies, they didn’t create and own the content.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Cheers John, good to have some stats to back up one’s gut
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Tim,
News doesn’t own all the content they sell either. They are still very poor at crediting content from social media sources and as far as I know provide no compensation to people whose content is already publicly available that they take and put behind their paywall. Aka selling content they don’t own.
I cannot see them adopting a policy of not including publicly available material in articles they put behind their paywall anytime soon.
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