The internet doesn't exist
One of the enemies of rational thought about whether online publishers can or should charge, is the word 'content' – with the emphasis, of course, on the con, not the tent.
'Content' implies that it’s all the same; the word defines all stuff that gets shovelled into websites, hoovered up by Google and glanced at by an ungrateful public.
At the moment 'content' is free. Rupert Murdoch wants to charge for it and has teams of crack News Corp operatives devising new paid content models.
Other newspaper publishers are nodding careful assent while secretly hoping Rupert erects a pay wall around his content while their own content remains free (mua-ha-ha).
Murdoch is also attacking the “kleptomaniacs” at Google. “The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,” he declared in an impassioned speech to world media executives at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People a week ago.
Meanwhile News Corp continues to allow Google to access all of its sites when it could easily put new instructions into its robots.txt file that would keep Google and other search engines out. It’s apparently so easy to do Rupert could do it himself.
A News Corp columnist, Mark Day, gave us a hint yesterday as to what his boss is on about: “I gather the aim is to create sites that appeal to various user groups, built in the style of social networks. Some will be aimed at youth markets, others at the so-called working families, others at upmarket, culturally influenced, older audiences. Some will be defined by geography (that is, city or regionally oriented); others by specific interests.
He says a clue to what it will look like is provided by the new Times+ which is attached to the Times and Sunday Times in Britain. This is a subscription website offering a big range of discounts on travel and shopping, free to subscribers of the newspaper but other wise £50 a year.
It looks pretty good to me, and definitely worth a try. But is it content? Well, yes … after all, it’s stuff on a website.
But it’s not journalism – it’s more like the old discount club, where you buy a card that gets you a discount when produced at restaurants and travel agents.
Journalism “comes at a price”, declared the head of News Digital Media, Richard Freudenstein, in a piece in The Australian on Saturday, as he criticised last week’s lecture by the managing director of the ABC, Mark Scott.
Scott had said, among other things: “Much of the content, most of it, nearly all of it when you look at the totality of the web – will be free. It will certainly be free online at the ABC.”
Freudenstein replied: “Quality journalism comes at a price. Although they play a key role in the digital age, even the best-intentioned citizen journalists and bloggers cannot provide the same service. Journalism is not a commodity, as Mark thinks it is.”
Actually, it probably is a commodity now, Richard, after 15 years of publishers, including you, giving it away and, more importantly, the appearance of vast numbers of non-journalists happily producing high quality “content” for nothing or very little.
The problem is that publishers like News Corp never did anything to define or distinguish their journalism to stop it becoming a commodity.
Everyone talks about “quality journalism” but what is it? I have my own ideas about that, but is there a definition written down anywhere that I can check against what I’m reading to determine whether it’s “quality journalism”, not a commodity, and therefore “should come at a price”?
And is there any standard qualification for the “quality journalist” who produces it, so I know that what I’m paying for is worth paying for?
Most of the blogs I read these days sure seem like “quality journalism” to me, indistinguishable from much the guff that appears in newspapers and is then republished online as “content”.
About ten years ago I wrote a piece for a newspaper that I thought then was pretty darn good, seminal even. It sank without trace, of course, and no one took the slightest notice of it, but it has always informed my own approach to online publishing. The essence of it was: “The internet doesn’t exist.”
I meant, and still mean, that the internet is merely a delivery mechanism for bits of data. It’s equivalent to the paper on which newspapers are printed or the air through which TV and radio signals are transmitted.
We never called newspaper journalism “paper content” or TV journalism “spectrum content” and the fact that it’s now online is, it seems to me, quite irrelevant.
In fact it is a colossal miscalculation to think that consumers distinguish between stuff they read on paper and stuff they read on a website, and that they have somehow decided they will pay for one and not other.
The problem is not that valuable journalism that previously carried a price has been made free by the internet and its kleptomaniacs, but that journalism that always had a natural price of zero actually had a cover price because of a cartel.
In other words, a lot of journalism had an artificial price on it that is now disappearing. A small amount of journalism is hanging onto its price because it’s worth paying for – for example, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Breaking Views, Stratfor, Point Carbon and so on.
I put my idea that “the internet doesn’t exist” into practice in 2004 when I started Eureka Report, a subscription magazine for investors delivered online.
When James Kirby and I started it, most people used a dial-up connection so it was a bit of a struggle at first, but now everyone has broadband. The fact that it’s delivered online is irrelevant: those who prefer reading on paper just print it out. Eureka now has 14,000 paying subscribers and numbers are growing every day.
We decided to make Business Spectator free, after first planning to charge, simply because all of the other equivalent websites, including News Corporation’s, were free as well – subsidised by newspaper profits.
After two years, Business Spectator is now moving into profitability based on advertising revenue, proving that the model can work – just like all the free newspapers work.
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