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.

Shock! Horror! Publishers co-operate with each other. In Ohio.

Many thanks to Merenda for drawing my attention to this story about the "OHNO" agreement between newspapers across the state of Ohio to share their stories with each other.

The unfortunately acronymed OHio News Organisation is explained thus by Plain Dealer columnist Ted Diadiun:

It took a bit of doing because the competitive instinct is in every good journalist's DNA, and most of us would swallow our notebooks before we'd share what's in them with another reporter. We've spent our professional lives trying to keep other newspapers from getting our good stories. Now, we're giving them away.

[...]

In today's world, breaking news is measured in minutes, not days. It's important that we provide our readers with the best news report we can, as soon as we can, on our Web site and in the best and most current newspaper possible each day.

With the OHNO plan, each afternoon we and the other members post the stories our reporters have written on a common Web site that's accessible only in the eight newsrooms. From there, editors at each paper select which stories they want to run. So the Cincinnati Enquirer was able to give its readers our coverage on the National City bank problems, and our editors were able to pick off the Enquirer's coverage of Fifth Third Bank, which is based in Cincinnati.

That doesn't mean we're not competing. For example, both The Plain Dealer and the Columbus Dispatch have reporters working hard to break news about the sexual-harassment charges besetting Attorney General Marc Dann's office. The difference now is that when we get to a good story first, not only our readers get to see it, but so do readers of the Dispatch and the other papers.

It's worth reading Ted's column in full.

It got me idly wondering whether this principle (which seems to me to be a very efficient and grown-up way of doing things) could be applied to the kind of weekly/monthly business magazines that we produce.

Could, for example, Estates Gazette (which we own) share news with Property Week (which we don't)? Almost certainly not - they compete head to head in a way that newspapers in different cities do not.

But how about Computer Weekly teaming up with an IT title from the US or one operating in a specialist market that CW doesn't compete directly with?

Could it happen?