Good news costs money

It appears increasingly likely that many more online news sites will move to a paid-for model in 2010.  There has been considerable pressure in that direction for some time, most notably from News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch, who has already introduced subscription charges for the Wall Street Journal and is expected to follow suit with the Times next year. 

That move is likely to be facilitated by yesterday’s announcement by Google, often criticised by Murdoch for its free “news aggregating” service, that it will allow online publishers to limit access to their content through a program called First Click Free, which will prompt users to register or subscribe to the news provider’s site after reading five articles in a day.

However, having apparently won the battle against Google, Murdoch now faces attack on another front, this time from Lord Mandelson, who, opening the debate yesterday on the second reading of the Digital Economy Bill, told the Lords:

There are some in the commercial sector who believe that the future of British media would be served by cutting back the role of the media regulator. They take this view because they want to commandeer more space and income for themselves and because they want to maintain their iron grip on pay-tv—a market in which many viewers feel they are paying more than they should for their movies and their sport. They also want to erode the commitment to impartiality—in other words, to fill British airwaves with more Fox-style news. They believe that profit alone should drive the gathering and circulation of news rather than allowing a role for what they call “state-sponsored journalism”.

The difficulty is that, without profit, many news providers – especially smaller ones – will die and, indeed, are already dying.  Only two months ago, the Neath Guardian, a Trinity Mirror title, closed after a disastrous collapse in circulation.  Across Britain, many other local newspapers are struggling.

Larger publishers are struggling, too.  Speaking this week at the World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, Chris Elliott, managing editor of the Guardian, announced plans to cut 70 to 100 journalist posts.  “We have to get on with doing the best we can with the resources we have,” he said.

The digital revolution has undoubtedly hit traditional newspapers hard, with readers increasingly accessing their content online free of charge.  In the long term, this must surely be unsustainable, a hard fact apparently recognised earlier this week by the Johnston Press when it announced that it would start charging for online access to six of its titles; the experiment will be watched with great  interest by the entire British newspaper industry.

Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch told the Reuters Global Media Summit in Washington that:

“Good journalism is an expensive commodity. We need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high-quality news and information does not come free.”

Murdoch in this respect is quite right.  A diverse press, online or otherwise, is essential to a healthy democracy.  We may not like it, but if we want continued access to good journalism that is not provided by the BBC, we had better get used to paying for it.