The great paywall of Murdoch

Murdoch wants to put our news behind a paywall, beginning with The Times and The Sunday Times, via a new payment model supposed to kick in in the very near future. Doubtless this is something he’s been planning since his first forays into the internet – like the purchase of MySpace – proved financially fruitless.

Bloomberg’s Matthew Lynn claims the project is doomed to failure:

It's too late to start charging for newspapers online. The content isn't good enough, and newspapers themselves are a product of technologies that simply don't work in a digital economy. All Murdoch is going to achieve with this move is to kill off one of the most famous media brands in the world.

For some unfathomable reason, media barons are approaching news in the electronic frontier dressed in the same expectations they had of the print medium, even though the information works in a completely different way.

Originally, the newspaper was a regular publication of current and topical issues and coverage designed, for the most part, for the general public. They first began to appear in the 17th century, as printed matter, coinciding with the invention of the printing press, although there had been previous circulation of handwritten newsheets and bulletins. In the 1800s, newspapers became cheap enough to mass-produce and consequently available to a much wider and more generalised readership.

Newspaper content has always been shaped by geographical and cultural influences and needs. For example, The Argus (now completely available and searchable online) is filled with ‘Shipping Intelligence’, public meetings, locating missing intoxicated persons and other news relevant to its historical period. In the 1850s, newspapers connected readers to distant homelands, to England (another major section in The Argus) and to their neighbourhoods. Newspapers were the principal way of sourcing information that affected an individual’s daily existence.

Obviously, shipping intelligence is not of great relevance to a majority of people today, implying that newspapers don’t serve the same purpose they once did. Comparing newspapers from the 1850s to the 1950s to now, the medium appears to have not changed that much. It doesn’t reflect developments in access to information, or the evolving nature of the information that people need and want.

In many ways, the internet has effectively reproduced many of the purposes of the newspaper: eBay for buying and selling; Gumtree and the Trading Post for classifieds; social networking sites for community information and happenings; multimedia coverage of sports, politics and world events; and citizen journalism. As well, the internet provides this information with a speed that is now expected by the reading public. Last week, for instance, Adriana Xenides' death was reported on Twitter before the newspapers got to the story.

Add to this television and radio coverage of the world and special interest areas, and you wonder: what purpose does the present-day newspaper serve?

Newspapers have always provided commentary but you could argue that even this function has been rendered obsolete by blogs. (And as Hugh McGuire from O’Reilly Media points out, it doesn’t take long to find bloggers we trust). Surely part of the reason the industry is in decline is because of a plethora of unqualified pundits offering commentary dressed up as news. Meanwhile, papers are running on skeleton staffs, with massive cutbacks of journalists and editors. If they can’t provide the same quality and level of news, or principally rely on celebrity and sensational news to fill their pages, what are readers expected to pay for?

Matthew Lynn argues that the current newspaper isn’t ‘worth the price’:

That is not a criticism of The Times in particular. Even British highbrow newspapers have placed too little emphasis on substance, and too much on entertaining and exciting their readers. Sensationalism worked as a strategy in the print world, when you were trying to get people to buy copies in a shop, usually with eye-catching headlines. Online, newspapers aim to build relationships with their readership through subscriptions. That involves creating a higher degree of trust and credibility. Newspapers have spent too much time blaming new technology for their decline and not enough examining what they offer readers.

Conceivably it’s investigative journalism newspapers are providing. Except, mostly they don’t. A majority of journalism has shifted from on the ground reportage to commentary.

A fortnight ago, Twitter and third-party news services largely covered the tragedies of the Freedom Flotilla. Traditional news organisations were important to the coverage, but none of them were Australian – until Paul McGeough was released, that is. If McGeough hadn’t been part of the flotilla – and been arrested – what would Fairfax’s coverage have looked like?

Readers have lost faith in newspapers. Journalists are typically viewed with suspicion; they’re either a mediocre mouthpiece for the owners or compromised in terms of editorial bias. If readers had to rely on the New York Times for information, they would think that Gaza is practically a tourist destination, where children frolic on the beach, as Ethan Bronner wrote earlier this week. George Orwell, eminent journalist that he was, once said, ‘Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper’.

So what, as readers, are we willing to pay for? What do we want newspapers to be? Possibly this is the place the development of a new news model should start at.

As Jeff Sparrow wrote on newmatilda:

Consider, for instance, how Murdoch’s plan to paywall his media content has led to a bitter (and already partially successful) campaign against the BBC. The News Ltd paywall is, as everyone knows, bad news for journalism, irrespective of what it does for company profits. A pay-for-content approach will mean you can no longer link to news. It takes the "inter" out of the "net", and transforms the web from a network back into a glorified electric newspaper. Quite obviously, the BBC model with its free content provides better value both for readers and for writers — which is precisely why Murdoch calls it unfair competition.

Yet even the BBC model hardly seems sustainable as a long-term solution; what happens when the government funding disappears?

But the print form does not have to die. The newspaper still allows for complex arguments, deep investigative journalism, longer pieces and narrative – all aspects that the internet struggles to replicate.

In these moments of crisis, let us turn for inspiration to media tycoons like Kane, who avows: ‘I’m not going to let my paper die. I’m not going to let any paper die’.