One of the great media stories of our time is the gradual decline of the traditional newspaper. These once ubiquitous news pamphlets have been placed under increasing stress by the freely available news brought courtesy of the internet.
One plan to redress this decline is in the form of a ‘pay wall’ for newspaper websites. People subscribing can read as much as they want, where others looking for freebies are limited in some way – such as restricting access to a certain number of articles per month.
The Telegraph reports on an interview conducted with media powerhouse Rupert Murdoch by journalist Marvin Kalb for The Kalb Report. It seems that Mr Murdoch see’s the future to be firmly in the paid-for camp:
“You’ll find, I think, most newspapers in this country are going to be putting up a pay wall,”
“Now how high does it go, does it allow (visitors) to have the first couple paragraphs or certain feature articles, we’ll see”
Perhaps even more interesting is what this could mean for some of the most powerful forces on the internet – the search engines.
“we’re going to stop people like Google and Microsoft and whoever from taking our stories for nothing.”
The suggestion seems to be that search engines would be able to index the newspaper stories but that when users click to view them they would be greeted by a subscription form.
It is interesting to consider how this will affect the average person using the internet as a news source. How often would that person be met with one of these pay walls? That would seem to depend on how people are consuming news. If you using a service such as Google News then the stories link to a number of different news sites who are covering that topic – if the idea of pay walls really takes off then doesn’t seem inconceivable that users could be presented with a number of these forms.
Could it be that this actually consolidates and reinforces brand loyalty back into news? If you have paid to view news on one site are you less likely to ‘graze’ other sites for limited access to other angles on the same news?
As we mentioned recently, the iPad could play an interesting role in this fight for news. Consumers could replace the traditional newspaper with the good-in-your-hands tactile approach of the tablet computer.
All of this doesn’t answer one question though. Will users pay for news content when an alternative could be a simple click of the mouse (or prod of the finger) away? This ingrained feeling that all news on the internet is free could be a difficult one to battle against.
When this idea of users perhaps being averse to paying for news online Mr Murdoch puts it succinctly:
“I think when they’ve got nowhere else to go they’ll start paying,”
..More information can be found in the Telegraphs full article, its well worth a read.
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