Does a free press really have to be free?
Who would have thought our daily dish of news could be served in so many ways? How do you like yours? Pre-digested soundbites in one of the BBC’s 90-second updates? Round the clock on News 24? Peering into a barely open broadsheet on a cramped commuter train? On your e-reader, your smart phone, as a ticker on your desktop? The choices go on.
It’s already quite hard to make money in the newspaper business while remaining competitive (just ask Conrad Black), but the development of mobile technology has changed our access to news beyond all recognition, adding a further layer of complexity to the news industry. As someone who is in the business of using technology to offer a new way of working, it is interesting to see how this industry is changing as a result.
Since The Times started charging for its online content three months ago, it has lost a significant number of readers. When questioned on the exact numbers, a spokesman told the BBC that it was “less than” 90% – so I’d guess that means more than 80%. News International now has 105,000 paid subscribers for its Times and Sunday Times websites, as well as the Kindle and iPhone apps. Of those, about a third of this number relates to app subscribers and the figures include single copy and pay-as-you-go readers.
It’s hard to know whether that counts as a success. It’s a drop in the ocean when you consider that only just over a year ago, the print edition of The Times alone was selling more than 600,000 copies a day. On the other hand, three months isn’t long to prove a concept, and although in the past we were happy to buy a paper, asking readers to pay for what they read on the web requires an attitudinal shift.
The whole point of the web is that it’s free at the point of use, a bit like the NHS (except you shouldn’t have to wait so long for an appointment). It’s understandably hard for people to accept that they should have to pay to read a website, especially when they’ve been used to accessing it freely. But while the major publishing houses recognise that their newspapers need a presence on the web – just as any brand does these days – if they are to maintain their journalistic standards and truly report the news, then they need to be able to pay their journalists. So revenue has to be generated somehow.
The news media in this country, although they can get a little sidetracked by footballer infidelities, have an important role to play in our democracy and, I’d argue, the vibrancy and economic success of the country as a whole. Just like any industry, they need to move with the times (note the lower case t) and embrace the changes in customer behaviour that technology brings.
Any business that dictates to its customers will be dead in the water. It needs to offer what they want now and stay ahead of the curve in anticipating what they will want next.
Matthew Reed is chief executive of PowerPlace.
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