On the recent thread about the ABC’s intention to offer a 24 hour news channel, commenter SCPritch linked, with appropriate approbation, to the text of a lecture by the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger.
Rusbridger’s topic was “Does Journalism Exist?”. It’s a long piece by online standards, but one of the very best I’ve read on all the vexed and often repetitive debates on the future of journalism. Gary Sauer-Thompson summarises the talk’s themes by arguing that it maps out a path towards “a mutualised news organisation”.
Rusbridger is concerned to interlink the debates about media business models with those about the role of journalists and their public responsibilities in a more sophisticated way than most writers on this set of related topics. But he does make it crystal clear that the model he believes is in the process of emerging can only do so on the basis of a business model which incorporates open access. For The Guardian, then, the economics of Rupert Murdoch and the New York Times‘s paywalls just doesn’t stack up:
My commercial colleagues at the Guardian – the ones who do think about business models – want to grow a large audience for our content and for advertisers, and can’t presently see the benefits of choking off growth in return for the relatively modest sums we think we would get from universal charging for digital content. Last year we earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business, but not trivial. My commercial colleagues believe we would earn a fraction of that from any known pay wall model.
They’ve done lots of modelling around at least six different pay wall proposals and they are currently unpersuaded. They’re looked at the argument that free digital content cannibalises print – and they look at the ABC charts showing that our market share of paid-for print sales is growing, not shrinking, despite pushing aggressively ahead on digital. They don’t rule anything out. But they don’t think it’s right for us now.
There’s more on this at the Reuters blog.
what is it with creeping americanisms? math?
wilful, blame Spellcheck.
But, on the topic under discussion. I wouldn’t expect the Guardian to do anything other than take the sensible approach it has. Admission: I am a very big Guardian fan. One of the joys of the internet.
He’s right about that, but I think he’s a bit disingenuous in failing to mention that the Guardian is currently losing 100 000 pounds a day. The organisation would have to change pretty dramatically to claw back from that.
“Math”? The Guardian is an English newspaper and this is an Austrlian blog so how about dropping the Americanisms?
Never fear newspapers, Steve Jobs is going to fix everything for you tomorrow apparently.
Paywall maths.
Ah, Leonidas beat me to it. That’s what I get for being too eager to take the piss.
The Guardian is looking at possibly losing its mainstay, the government employment ads in the UK. If this link is correct then they will be in the hole for a lot more than 100,000 pounds a day.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/bulletins/br/article/608006/guardian-hit-tory-plans-job-ads-site/
“..The Guardian’s Wednesday Society section, losing around £790m spent by local and central government on job ads each year. The dedicated public sector website would only cost an estimated £5m…”
In one sweep the Tories would save money, and cripple some of its opposition. Id be guessing the poll numbers for Lab in the UK are focussing some minds on revenue generating mesures…
Yeah! Glad someone mentioned the influence of government advertising and it wasn’t me!
And whilst youse are a-bitchin’ bout grammer, super-heroes are dying.
Or losing their business models across the USA, hey!
Bring on the 25 hour news channel I say.