The End of Free Online News?

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannysullivan/ / CC BY 2.0

A few blog posts ago I wrote about how Rupert Murdoch and other publishers have been discussing ways to charge the public for viewing online news from newspaper websites. This issue has been circulating the journalism world for a while now, especially as newspaper readerships continue to dwindle, which therefore sees advertising revenue decrease as a result. 

This week has seen two big announcements which have made the possibility of charging for online news more real. Earlier this week, Johnston Press (The UK's largest regional newspaper publisher) announced plans to begin charging for access to six of it's online titles. A move which has come about following a 42% slump in advertising revenue. This is a clear indication that news in traditional newspaper format is a dieing trade as the Internet continues to dominate the media world. 

The second announcement came today from search engine Google, which has said it will limit the amount of free news available to people using the site. Google plays a massive role when it comes to websites and their traffic. Getting into the Google Index (which makes your site available to Google searches) is pretty key when it comes to earning more traffic, purely down to the amount of traffic and users Google gets itself. The move follow claims that the search engine is profiting from from online news pages through online advertising revenue.

The new changes will mean that publishers can now limit users to no more than five pages per day without subscribing or registering and may mean that users will start to see registration screens when they click for a sixth time.

I think that over the new few years more and more news websites will be charging viewers to read their online content, especially as online news continues to win the battle against newspapers, an especially as newspaper revenue continues to suffer.

The battle between Old Media and New Media rages on, but these recent developments seem to suggest that the tide is continuing to turn in favour of New Media and inparticular, The Internet.

BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8389896.stm

Paying for Online Content...

Image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adambowie/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I read in the Independent today that Rupert Murdoch let slip last week that he has been talking to other publishers about how to charge online readers for the content produced on newspaper websites.

The principle behind it is that many people are turning to websites for their primary source of news as opposed to buying newspapers. Newspapers are obviously losing money from this as many people will choose to use the Internet and get the news from newspaper websites for free, instead of buying the actual paper. The Internet has had a massive effect on traditional media, especially newspapers, and will continue to run them out of business as many media experts have predicted. This year has seen two of the newspapers in the above image already go bust, The London Paper and The London Lite (admittedly these were freesheets!)

I found this article from 2006 in Time which states "Newspapers on paper are on the way out. Whether newspaper companies are on the way out too depends. Some of them are going to find the answers. And some are going to fritter away the years quarreling about staff cuts." (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1538652-2,00.html)

I think a key player in all of this is advertising. As it says in the article above, newspaper companies could survive if they can keep advertising revenue from the online content, even if the newspapers themselves go bust. Increasing the advertising could also be key as advertising really is the lucrative market here.

The main opposition will come from people not wanting to pay for the content, especially as they are paying for their Internet connection already. But I think that this is something that could easily be counteracted.

I think if newspapers were to become extinct I'd consider paying for news from a professional news source, written by a professional journalist, mainly because I think the credibility of that compared to a blog written by 'some acned 12-year-old in his parents' basement recycling rumors from the Internet echo chamber' as the above article humorously suggests, would clearly be much more reliable. Credible journalism costs money so I would have to say that it isn't fair for readers to expect this for free. I'd still prefer a paper though!