Newspapers Behind the Pay Wall

The newsprint industry is now watching Rupert Murdoch’s News International with interest as it moves online readers from free reading to a pay to access of The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers from June. The UK papers will become the first national titles to charge for access to their whole sites which will cost £1 per day or £2 per week. They also have announced the intent to move their Tabloid papers , the Sun and The news of the World to a pay model later in the year.

What will be the outcome? Will consumers switch to the pay model or simply click to other sites who offer the same or similar content for free. Until now only The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have operated a pay wall online, but many argue that there content is more focused and a must have in financial sectors and to many of their readers it’s a chargeable expense. On the other hand papers such as the Guardian has built a significant online following based on free and don’t intend to make any moves away from it today. The New York Times tried to move to a subscription service for features and opinion content but withdrew it when few readers took up the option.

At a time when; broadcast news is available 24x7 over the Internet to even your mobile, when you can get free services to aggregate access to tens of leading newspapers around the world for free, when you can get Google to aggregates snippets and even feed specific interests to you on the move and where the line between journalism and social comment blurs under the democratisation of writing - is the pay wall viable? Over the last decade 24x7 broadcast news, free commuter papers and online news have reduced people's reliance on printed news but set an expectation of free.

The papers expected the business model to shift to one based on advertising but they have seen previously highly-profitable classified adverts and display advertising migrate online to others.

The Times and Sunday Times sites will be redesigned and re-launched in may and move to the new model in the summer. Will additional applications, moving images, dynamic infographics, interactive comment and personalised news feeds entice people to pay or will they merely vote with their clicks and leave Murdoch frustrated.

So will we be curling up with our laptop and tablet on a Sunday morning or still immersed in a mountain of print supplements? Will the newspaper delivery boys get a day of rest? Will online give the heavyweight newspapers a real sense of what articles actually count and which are mere fillers? Will we pay for what we can easily get elsewhere for free? Is newspaper loyalty that strong?

News: Thought for today

Nicholas D. Kristof recently wrote in the New York Times, The Daily Me:

“The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we'll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected 'news' acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays.”

News is Not Grey

Are those enlarged eInk devices such as the Kindle DX/3, Plastic Logic and other big tablets really going to save the world of the newspapers?

We don’t think so, nor do we believe that replicating a broadsheet on a slab in greyscale is going to turn the masses on. It reminds us once again of Michael Douglas running up the beach with the earlier mobile that resembled a brick or Fred Flinstone reading the daily news from a stone slab. To some size matters but over and over again the consumer tells us convenience, portability, compactness and style score over clunky. Let’s face it the thieves are going to have a birthday with these as they aren’t exactly things one puts in one pocket and they aren’t cheap! Picture a busy tube, bus or train and everyone reading a grey slab.

We think we have already given too much space to the eink slab reader, however we note that eink obviously feel that they are on a winner bring a grey world to the masses. Wired reports that they have released a new line of its broadsheet prototype kits aimed at attracting newspaper developers. The AM-300 kit offers a 9.7-inch display and allows companies to experiment and build their own prototype readers on the larger format. They did something similar in releasing a kit for ebooks last year which was priced at $3000 and was taken up by companies looking to create ebook reader lookie-likies and we’ve see plenty of them!

The new developer kit has a graphical electronic paper display with pen input and also includes a Linux x86 operating environment, E Ink API software for Broadsheet, sample images, open source software drivers and other applications that support MMC cards, Bluetooth and USB. The 9.7-inch AM300 kit will begin shipping on May 27th, priced at $4,000.

We believe that newspapers like all media needs to navigate the stormy waters of digital change, but it has to first decide what it wants to offer, how that offer can be communicated, paid for and value be perceived by consumers. It is a journey of baby steps and experimentation. News isn’t dying, nor is the demand for it, just the way its communicated, consumed and paid for.

Hearst to Move Onto eInk?

It is unclear as to whether individual media companies will follow the Amazon route and build their own devices and try and control their own channels or whether they will adopt a more open and inclusive approach to the market.

Hearst Corporation, the giant media conglomerate, announced it will launch an e-reader of its own by the end of the year. Hearst’s magazine and news papers include SmartMoney, Esquire, Oprah Winfrey's O Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Popular Mechanics, Seventeen 16 daily and 49 weekly newspapers including San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer both of which Hearst has put up for sale.

The first unkown is the device which is almost certain to be based on eink with Hearst Interactive Media being among a group of strategic investors that have together poured more than $150 million into E Ink’s technology. Will they use Plastic Logic device or opt for their own? What is becoming clear is that the Hearst e-reader will almost certainly be larger and wireless to accommodate the format of newspapers and magazines. This will help reproduce the more-complex layouts of print periodicals as well as letting advertisers buy spots in the sizes and format they're already used to. However for now they will have to accept greyscale which to some degree will dilute the appeal of their glossy magazines to consumers and to their advertisers. There is some speculation that Hearst is exploring making the device foldable or rollable to enhance portability.

The second unknown is the business model with many predicting that the will attempt to move from the free online to a subscription model a tricky move with only a few such as Wall Street Journal sticking ridgidly to it. However we note that Newsday has declared their intent to move to a paid model for their online edition.

The Hearst e-reader may work if readers see added value but we are now seeing the collapse of newspapers as we have known them for over 100 years. Advertising revenue, the shift of classified advertising to the likes of Craigslist, online free news, services such as Google news and the news on your mobile are all compounding to cannibalising the model.

How Do You Want Your News Tomorrow?

The financial burden from an advertising downturn, rising costs for newsprint, the migration of readers to the Internet, the huge debt some have to service and the general lack of a visible business model that will support the sector in the digital world, has caused many US newsprint operations to question if they can survive and what survival means.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has filed for bankruptcy, the Chicago Tribune has its debt problems, the New York Times has suspended its dividend, and the story goes on to cover what looks like many of the major cities in the US.

Now the Journal Register, publisher of 20 local daily and weekly newspapers, primarily in the Philadelphia, Cleveland and Michigan has filed has for bankruptcy. Also Philadelphia Newspapers, which owns The Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com, has also filed for bankruptcy protection in a bid to restructure its $390 million debt.

We have written about the plight of the strip cartoon and how cartoonists have seen the writing on the wall and redefining their relationships.

However there doesn’t appear to be a quick fix to any of the mounting problems of this sector. Some would say that although they fed us the news and offered advice to us all, they just were unprepared for the bad news and change themselves. Is local and specialist news now becoming democratised and are we seeing a fundamental change in how news is created, communicated and digested? Can we honestly see ourselves still buying paper newsprint in the near future and would we be prepared to pay a digital subscription for what is in many cases syndicated news? Why would we pay for news when its free on TV and better tailored to suit our individual needs view the Internet?

So what of newsprint in the digital age?

We bet you wouldn't do that with a Kindle or Plastic Logic device!

We have heard as many, if not more, predictions about the death of the newspaper over the years than any over media format. Although its history is long, the tabloid as we know it today is barely a century old. Driven my mass literacy, it rose to give the masses their daily news, gossip, insights, sport and classifieds, but today the world has changed and the newspaper world has to adjust to survive.

Television was the first salvo across its bow. It gave us our daily news which now is on a constant loop and available anywhere, anytime. Moreover it gave us pictures, realism and breaking news in real-time. The Internet has continued to expand on this and now means instant alerts, and access to any story 24 x 7. Also consolidated news from journals such as The Week provided more condensed and digestible reviews than the weighty weekenders.

Mobile technology not only gave us news on the move it changed how users interacted with the news. Suddenly everyone potentially became a journalist or photographer on the spot and who cared if the pictures were grainy – they were real time. Blogs sprung up offering news and views for free. The writing may not have been as creative or clever but like YouTube’s impact on video it was clearly visible.

The Internet opened up the lucrative classified ads , making them more readily searchable and increased their appeal to a wider audience. The free classified operators such as Craigslist in the US, as well as Kijiji and Gumtree internationally extended the appeal. Craigslist.org was one of the first online classified sites, and has grown to become the largest classified source, bringing in over 14 million unique visitors a month. This new shift has cannibalized newsprint classified revenues and now the more mainstream adverts are moving online.

Now we have the news meltdown. The Tribune Company has given a two-year notice to the Associated Press that its daily newspapers plan to drop the news service, becoming the first major newspaper chain to do. The dispute may be over new rates but the move is one that signals further changes in these tempestuous waters.

However, the real change is in the user and how, what and when they want and also how they value it.

Google Hoovers up More News

Libraries, books and newsprint are all targets for Googles endless search to hover up the world’s information.

Google is to digitize dozens of historical newspapers making scanned images of the original papers available online. Google has said in it’s website that it is looking to make old newspapers searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. They have been working two major U.S. newspapers; The New York Times and Washington Post, to index old papers in Google News Archive. These have been joined by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "the first newspaper West of the Alleghenies" (the Allegheny Mountains), to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which has continuously published for 244 years, making it North America's oldest lasting paper.