Larvatus Prodeo

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.