^{This the headline from a story that broke recently in the US - it’s worth a read. But it begs the question;will we see a similar situation arise in the UK? What we do know is that the industry is in trouble: circulations are down, advertising revenues are down, the web is no longer seen as the great savior but more a drain on resources and cash. But worse still, there seems to be no light on the horizon.}

In the US many publishers are looking at “how to charge for on line content” as a method of generating revenue and contributing toward the cost of providing quality editorial. Just two weeks ago, Roy Greenslade wrote in the Evening Standard that some media owners where beginning to float the idea and are watching the public’s response and industry opinion "towards publishers beginning to charge for content on line." If you want a idea of some other opinions, go to TechCrunch which covered the story yesterday and had 44 comments in the first day.

"Guardian Media Group is considering charging for content in some specialist areas of Guardian.co.uk such as Media Guardian", its chief executive Carolyn McCall has revealed.

She said: "If you are a national news site which prides itself on high quality content, if you have the BBC which can put out content for free on every single aspect of politics, current affairs, government, community - it's very difficult to pay for content because you are in competition with the BBC." But she added: "There will be some parts of our website - Media Guardian, specialist areas - where we should think about how we should charge for content”. What was more interesting is that McCall also confirmed what many of us in the industry know and that is GMG makes "lots of money" out of sites such as Autotrader and Guardian Jobs.

But what has this to do with the US story? Some months ago a story broke that a certain Government minister had “suggested” that local authorities should not use their career sites to compete with local media for traffic which would impact on the local media outlet’s revenue. The result might have been £100s of millions of recruitment revenue going back into local press. Thus far we have seen no such move from those in local government. The whole debate does raise the issue: how does the “press” survive? It does look like that in the US a “bailout” might be on the way, in France this has already happened and across Europe newspapers are in trouble.

How would the public respond to open public funding of the print media? The arguments focus on; the quality of journalism, freedom of information and local democracy. There is a concern that if we lose local/community newspapers we somehow lose access to local information, an outlet for government information and that this might impact on local democracy. Politicians globally have become concerned by the “perceived decline in editorial quality” drive by the growth of “non professional journalism” (blogs) plus the increase in aggregated content which delivers no “value” to the content generator. Just this weekend in the Sunday Times business section this issue was discussed.

The call for some form of public funding, either direct or indirect (getting public authorities to use/advertise in the local/community media) may well increase. This creates a difficult choice for local authorities who have invested heavily in building strong on-line recruitment brands which has helped them reduce the amount they spend with local media. In doing so they may be hastening the decline or even death of their local newspaper and this begs the question: do we want to replace a “print monopoly” (the local newspaper franchise) with a ‘web monopoly”? Well the good news is that because of the success that local authorities have had in building their own career portals this is unlikely to happen.

This evolution will happen. The dinosaurs really did die, so is this the end of press journalism? The challenge facing the media, the politicians and us, the public, is: how do we pay for good journalism? I am not suggesting that web based information sites would not have good journalism, but the trend to date shows that we, the public, are resistant to paying for “on line content”. Will we find some way to take good press journalism put it on line and fund it? Do we need local/community based print media? Or are we happy to see that migrate online, but with less professional journalism? And what responsibility do the content aggregators (Google etc) have to help fund the content they aggregate?

And we come back full circle to the debate: should governments bailout the print media?

Last update : 24-06-2009 12:55

Average user rating

   (0 vote)