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?