A couple of things I’ve listened to/watched here that talk about the demise of newspapers, the idea of paywalls, and the potential of new media.
The first is from Telstra’s blog (which is often cited as an example of a corporate blog that works) nowearetalking, and is a discussion with Tim Burrowes who publishes the media and advertising site Mumbrella:
The second is a link to ABC’s PM, which yesterday had a short report on Murdoch’s push for newspapers to establish paywalls.
What was most interesting about this discussion for me was the idea that News Ltd bosses in the US were looking at creating a consortium of media owners to start charging consumers for content – so they’d all be in it together. After all, paywalls won’t work if only one site or group of sites is doing it and people have alternatives.
Apart from being- as Alan Fels points out in the PM report – anti-competitive, this solution seems disingenuous to me.
My reasons for doubting the power of paywalls are theoretical, but then again, so are the mogul’s reasons for believing in them. The success of new media and digital technology as a whole is based on the fact that it is accessible and infinitely replicable.Charging for the majority of content online goes against both those instincts.
To use the phrase Murdoch applied to himself, this is a policy thought up by digital immigrants. They seem to be missing the point: that you can’t control the internet. It’s like Eliot Bledsloe from Creative Commons Australia said once: “Copyright – get over it.” Granted it was a different discussion and he was being slightly facetious, but in terms of online content, the same principle can be applied. Perhaps “exclusivity – get over it” or at least “if it’s exclusive it better be almost perfect.”
Or maybe you can go against the free will of the digital format – I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. Paywalls certainly work to a certain extent for niche websites or sites to which people assign a moral as well as informative value ( I’m thinking of Crikey when I say this – I believe that their subscribers see them as an important voice in the media landscape, even if they don’t read it every day).
But what Murdoch is proposing is that we essentially lock up one of the major activities undertaken on the web, news sourcing. Won’t that annoy anyone who has accessed news for so long for free? More than that, I think it will annoy people who are digital natives, because they live their lives online for free – free blogging software, free music listening, free email, free photo sharing – and this will seem like an affront to that way of using the web.
One way I do see it working in Australia, though, is that you could charge more for a combined subscription to the site and the print copy to be home delivered. I’d certainly buy one. Either way, I hope they come up with something.
Posted by bowerbirdblue 
