News Corp will be watched very carefully as it announces plans to charge for online content
It was a debate that came and went in the early days of the commercial web and now it seems it is back with a vengeance – to charge or not to charge for online news content.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has announced it will be introducing costs for its online news as following losses of £2bn it looks to new ways to generate income.
It’s been a long running battle for news providers since the very early days when the mantra ‘content is king’ used to echo up and down the corridors of dot.com entrepreneurs’ offices.
Some papers made an early attempt to charge for content only to quickly change their strategy and there have always been some who continue to charge for premium content or additional access to, for example, archives.
But one of the overall wonders of the World Wide Web has been the way it has forced ‘traditional’ content providers to adopt new models of distribution – which has largely resulted in a free content bonanza for the rest of us.
Suddenly we can read daily newspapers from around the world, free of charge – want to know what’s happening in Alice Springs? Or in fact pretty much any country anywhere in the world? It’s all there.
Advertising has typically been the goose that’s laid this particular golden egg, websites have been funded by a variety of advertising and sponsorship deals, but there’s also no doubt that keeping a competitive edge in the world of free content puts real pressure on many publications.
With the current recession sending advertising revenue spiralling downwards it’s perhaps no surprise that News Corp is looking at this new move. Content needs to be generated from somewhere, by someone and if it’s your day job you’re going to want to be paid for it.
Whether it works or not remains to be seen, no doubt many other media channels will be watching with eager eyes and calculators at the ready.
But maybe, just maybe we might be standing on the outskirts of a more fundamental shift in the way news is reported. With the rise of free blogging sites, cameras and videos on every mobile phone in the land, armed with our microblogs and our endless ability to comment on every posting, text in our views to every radio and TV programme are we about to witness the rise of user-generated news?
It’s pretty much already out there, all it needs is a site to aggregate the content and make sense of it for visitors – a brave new media world indeed and one which some may argue we are already heading toward at a frightening pace.
Yes journalism is a skill and yes the objective nature of news reporting is important, but when traditional models are visibly creaking in the winds of change, when more and more exclusives are being broken online and when the openness of the web enables previously unheard voices to speak up, it is a question worth asking.
If we don’t think it’s a good thing then perhaps we need to rethink our expectations of what we get for free – if nothing else the lessons of the last 12 months should have taught us that there is normally a hidden cost that may only become evident further down the line.
To subscribe or not to subscribe – you decide, but don’t forget it was your decision.