A couple weeks ago I participated on a panel at the 2010 Buying & Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale, AZ. First, let me send my compliments to the organizers of this great conference. It was a really interesting and engaging single-stream program, and a great reminder of the value in getting out of the office once in while and connecting with smart people who think passionately about your business and industry.
The theme of the conference was “Reigniting the Content Economy”, and as you can see from the conference program, there were a lot of great sessions on how to develop content that engages your users and deal with the changing forces in our industry. Unsurprisingly, then, there seemed to be a pervasive theme running across all of the sessions around the question of how users will react to the attempts of a number of publishers to erect or reinstate paywalls around content.
My own panel session was called “Whose Eyeballs Are They Anyway?”, and was a lively discussion between myself, Patrick Spain and Mark Walker around the tension between content creation, content aggregation, the link economy, and where the value lies for endusers. Charlie Terry did a great job moderating the discussion. And although we tried to focus the conversation on the issues around the link economy and free news aggregation, the questions about the economic value of news itself, and whether news organizations who are trying to extract direct revenue for their products are foolhardy to do so, kept creeping in.
Obviously, at News Corp. we’ve been out front in the idea that good journalism should often be paid journalism (this is probably a good place to note that I am here offering my own opinions, and not representing any official position of either News Corp., or my employer, Dow Jones), and we’ve taken a lot of heat for it. With some suggesting that we’re challenging the very values of Journalism itself. Perhaps I don’t understand the premise behind the notion that putting our content behind pay walls somehow challenges the values of Journalism or, worse still, leads to the end of Journalism as we know it.
To my mind, our experience of the last decade–in which it became conventional wisdom that all information wants to be free and that nobody would ever be willing to pay for content again–was the anomoly that challenged the values of journalism, not the other way around. Sure, the world of journalism today has changed (e.g., the emergence of freemium, niche microsites, content linking and free news aggregation) , but that’s not to say the model we currently have is sustainable.
Prior to the advent of the Web, traditional journalism has always existed with a paywall, even if that was the newstand or home-delivery price of your favorite newspaper, magazine, journal or newsletter. And people have always been willing to pay for quality content, even when free alternatives existed. Even in the recent past, just because you could hear or see news on your radio or television for free (albeit subsidized by advertising), you wouldn’t necessarily cancel your various paid content-subscriptions. If you valued specific content because it provided you unique value in either quality, form or channel, you were willing to pay for it.
Of course, none of this means that our media andscape hasn’t dramatically changed. And of course, many of these changes have been for the better. The advent of real-time news through channels like Twitter, the expansion of community-generated content via the blogosphere, and the lowering of the overall cost of entry in our industry have made things richer and more dynamic for all of us. These innovations have further democratized the publishing space and often with dramatic consequences, as we witnessed in the Iranian elections. We should be be embracing these changes whole-heartedly, as both publishers and consumers of news (and at Dow Jones, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of doing so).
But these changes have also greatly increased noise for news consumers and challenged the economics of our business. As online advertising revenue alone has proved to be unable to support the high cost of rich news generation activities and the death of print classifed advertising drained newspapers of some of their most important revenue, many newspapers have been unable to survive. In addition, the rush by many news organizations to feature their otherwise paid content for free on the Web created a false economy. The perception that quality, reported news was a cheap commodity spread, even as the producers of that content were going broke providing it. A push to move to an entirely free news model, or one mostly driven by community-generated content and citizen journalists, would lead to the eventual loss of things I believe most news consumers take for granted and rely upon: foreign bureaus reporting on high-level government sources, extended development and reporting on important long form stories, source cultivation, fact checking, etc. All these are a by-product of professional journalism with an adequately resourced news organization standing behind it.
Some have argued that the emergence of a highly linked content world has dramatically changed how we practice journalism, and I would agree with that. However, the existence of our highly linked content environment isn’t threatened any more by the existence of paywalls around some content then it will be by the eventual financial collapse of many of the major news providers if a partial paid-content model can’t be made to work.
So how do we adapt to this environment? Actually, I think we at Dow Jones & News Corp. are a pretty good model for how to do so: (1) ensure that the content you provide provides real and unique value to your users, and then (2) steer the commercial model for news production back to an economically sustainable model–which means a mix of free, advertising supported and paid-content. None of this is to say that all content providers will or should demand a paywall system for their content. Each publisher will have to decide if their content provides enough unique and demonstrable value that users will then be willing to pull out their wallets and pay up.
Either way, companies like News Corp. are challenging accepted wisdom around things like whether giving all your content to Google is necessary for survival or that all content should be free. This kind of experimentation is good for all of us in the publishing industry, and as Richard Hull, President of Blowtorch Media & Entertainment, noted in one of the early sessions at BSeC10, what’s too often missing in traditional print media is a willingness to experiment.
Our Factiva aggregation business is another model that’s been both historically successful and we think still has a strong future. A paid aggregator like Factiva helps publishers monetize their content and reinforces the value of the content being licensed, while also providing real value to the user by helping them cut through the noise of the Web and search or track news against a sub-set of higher-quality, trusted sources. In the end, a paid aggregation model like Factiva, or some other way of connecting the paywalls of multiple, competing publishers will probably required in order to maintain the kind of dynamic, linked content environment we’ve all come to value.
Most of these aren’t new questions, or new tradeoffs, just new inputs and a new framework in which to operate. Paid content has always been a part of the traditional journalism, and I think a critical part of keeping the world of journalism both vibrant and healthy.
Ryan (@ryanpwarren)
