Online payments are now a sign of The Times
I’m not a huge fan of The Times, and I’d be happy if Rupert Murdoch got trapped in a cave and had to spend his remaining years munching moss and repenting for his sins. However, I’m nonetheless disappointed by the general reaction to The Times’s plans to start charging for web content (source: BBC).
The plan is for users to pay £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription. As far as I can tell, the generation response is: wah wah wah, not fair, wah wah, I’ll go elsewhere to the other bajillion sites that offer free news, wah wah, everything should be free! *throws toys out of pram*
Here’s the thing: there aren’t that many places that offer well-researched and professionally written journalism, and many of those that do are largely opinion-based rather than investigative. There are, of course, exceptions, but the bulk of them are online offshoots of print publications losing up to £1m per week, and it’s clear they won’t last long. (Indeed, anyone crowing about how great this model is might ask whether a Russian billionaire would have had to buy the Indie for £1 if it wasn’t losing money hand over fist.)
Times columnist Caitlin Moran has been responding to people on Twitter about her publication’s plans, and her tweets sum things up nicely. “Wow – loads of people asking what I think about the forthcoming Times paywall. I think, ultimately, my position is: I have a mortgage,” she says. “I love the freewheeling, anarchic, infinite-information aspect of the internet. I just need to ally that with paying for food and shit.”
Unfortunately, too many people have a warped sense of value these days, and think all creative content should be free, whether it’s news, music, movies or videogames. But when the creators don’t make money (whether said creators are companies or individuals), here’s the thing: they stop creating or, at best, dumb things down and drop the quality. News is already there. Most online ‘journalism’ is bullshit, with people frantically copying and pasting stories without bothering to do any investigation or check any facts, and that’s because they’re being paid a few quid for a blog post (if that), rather than a decent amount of money to write some informed, professional copy.
Perhaps The Times’s experiment will be a massive failure and the future really will be ‘free’ (or ‘freemium’), but, as Jörg Tittel noted to me on Twitter earlier, it’s time the industry stopped trying to justify ‘free’ over ‘paid’ for good value. So, despite the fact I don’t care for The Times and think Murdoch would be better not seen and not heard, I hope the website makes huge wodges of cash, enabling other publishers to follow suit.
The thing is that I and many other people don’t really think that The Times does deliver sufficiently high-quality journalism (particularly compared to the other – currently free – sources) to make the purchase price worthwhile.
But on the flipside, The Times is stuffed because without a popular Internet micropayments system, it has to charge more than anyone wants to pay merely to cover transaction costs. If it could charge a penny to access an article via micropayment, people wouldn’t be complaining at all, I reckon.
Until micropayments come of age, people are simply going to get their news content elsewhere – for free.
In terms of ‘quality’, that’s a failure of the specific organisation’s content provision, rather than the model – and it’s the model most people are complaining about (as in, having to pay anything at all). As for ‘free’, it’s already becoming a massive problem and causing too many ‘journalists’ to regurgitate facts without doing any investigative research whatsoever. Only funding will put a stop to this and the death/evolution of a 300-year-old industry.
> In terms of ‘quality’, that’s a failure of the specific organisation’s content provision, rather than the model
I disagree: the objective quality of The Times is approximately equal to all of the other broadsheets, and I would have said exactly the same thing about any of them*.
And that’s exactly why this is a failure of the model: if you want to charge, you have to demonstrate sufficiently well that you’re better than the alternatives, and that you’re better proportional to the amount of money being charged. No newspaper is currently worth the mooted access price, but they have to charge that much because of the absence of a low-cost micropayments engine. I’m sure there’s an economics term for this situation!
It’s trivially obvious that people *are* willing to pay for broadsheet-quality news reporting, incidentally, and we could even calculate roughly how much they are willing to pay per article. I believe that it is simply that the mechanism for access does not yet exist.
Finally, let us not shed a tear for the potential passing of the dead-tree press for its own sake: progress marches ever onwards, and history is littered with discarded, obsolete media, from the telegraph to the lighthouse, woodcuts to VHS tapes. We discard these things when something better comes along, and that’s exactly what we’re doing to the printed word today.
(*Apart from the FT, which has a strong incentive to deliver accurate financial information and which can therefore charge for access to it!)
I’m not concerned about the passing of newspapers—I’m concerned about the increasingly rapid descent of journalism into the mire.
Due to the general expectation that news should be free, budgets are dropping, massively reducing investigative journalism and hugely increasing uninformed, lazy copy and paste. Perhaps The Times doesn’t have it right in the method it’s using, and perhaps micropayments could be the way to go. But I applaud The Times for at least trying things, because, frankly, something needs to be done before all the publications worth reading go to the wall, leaving us with the dross.
It seems to me that the issue of charging for access and the quality of journalism should be considered separately. If the content was high quality and unique, then I could see myself paying for access to a news website… but not at that daily rate.
And while the newspapers remain in the hands of individuals with particular political agendas, the quality of journalism will always be undermined by editorial policy