Cash for news

Our corporate Yammer channel is abuzz with amusing discussions about whether or not it would be possible to charge people to read our news content.

Some people are quite excited because if Mr Murdoch thinks he can (and Rob Grimshaw at the FT is bullish about it too) then that should be good enough for us.

Interestingly most of the debates seem to polarise the question between two business models: advertising vs pay-to-view/subscriptions.

But newspapers, magazines and websites are more complicated than that and so is life:

• When I buy my newspaper to read on the train in the morning, am I paying for news? Well, yes, partly.
  
• If it stopped containing the news would I still buy it? Probably not.
• If it only contained the news would I still buy it? Probably not.

But news is very much part of my paper's brand (it's not a red top, obviously).

The polarisation of the arguments is misleading too. I might not pay for online news but I might pay for something else from the place I get my online news. Telegraph readers stump up to play Fantasy Football and do the crossword, for example. Sun readers pay to play bingo.

Generally speaking business magazine revenues have been in decline for years but other revenue areas - face-to-face (conferences, exhibitions and events) have been a growth area for many. So too have paid-for non-news services and in some cases, news brands have to some degree become a cross between a marketing medium and the badge of trust for these other services.

If you took the murderously expensive news content out of the magazines , how powerful a brand would you have left? I don't know.

Is news too important to be left to the market?

I don't get involved in the news side of our operations very much other than to try and seduce journalists into spending time interacting with their audience but I do, of course, see the doom and gloom every day about the future of newspapers in particular and especially in the US.

The ding-dong going on at Roy Greenslade's blog over the alleged declining news values of the Telegraph (among others) is interesting. As his mole describes it:

"To paraphrase, comment is cheap but facts are expensive. And I don't trust many media organisations to make the investment required to uncover new facts, which I believe should be the currency of journalism, when there is so much cheaper content available to them."

Among the accusations flying around is the notion that the Telegraph has a policy of recycling news from other papers. I have mixed feelings about this as a criticism (after all, it works quite well in the blogosphere). From the point of view of a Telegraph journalist it must be pretty depressing, but from a Telegraph reader's point of view it's probably neither here nor there - but on balance it's probably better to hear about something interesting that was reported in the Daily Mail (probably a bad example) the day before than not to hear about it at all.

Of course, even what we take to be quality journalism isn't always as good as it should be but as the economic pressures and online migration and the rise of free newspapers take their toll, you do wonder where it's all going to end.

For all its faults, thank goodness for the BBC. Is the news too important to be left to the free market? Or does the market just need to re-think - perhaps reinventing wire services and developing more co-operation between competitors (as local papers have done in the US).

But when I think about all this to much I get depressed. I refuse to accept the free papers in London (Metro, London Lite and whatever the other one is called; none of them noted for their incisive journalism) for what I grandly like to think of as ethical issues mostly do do with the waste. But the vast majority of the travelling public take them and at the end of the day the public gets what the public wants and the market delivers it. If they (in viable numbers) don't really want news, then what's the future for news?

Update: forgot to mention that this happened to day too.