Financial Times editor sees news Web sites charging for access within a year
If the editor of the Financial Times is to be believed, the halcyon days of free news on the Internet are coming to an end.
Lionel Barber at the Financial Times is saying that within the next twelve months news organizations are going to move off of the free access business model and head into the paid subscription format. This is largely in part to declining ad revenue, but one has to wonder if those who keep the current ad supported format won’t be the really big winners.
In an interview with The Guardian, Mr. Barber was pointedly asked how this concept could possibly work for general news sites, and he replied that everyone is going to have to make themselves distinctive. “Yes,” he replied when asked if people will pay for that, “if they feel that it is distinctive enough, and it’s different. You’ve got to be different, set yourself apart from the common.” While Mr. Barber fully admitted that publications such as his Financial Times have a leg up because of its specialty nature, he still feels that the subscription route is the one the majority will soon be taking.
Mr. Barber couldn’t resist getting a swipe in at bloggers, the source many people feel of a significant portion of the current economic woes of print journalism:
[blogs] do not operate according to the same standards as those who aspire to and practice crafted journalism. They are often happy to report rumor as fact, arguing that readers or fellow networkers can step in to correct those “facts” if they turn out to be wrong. They are rarely engaged in the pursuit of original news: their bread and butter is opinion and comment.
While all of this is well and good, it isn’t too difficult to imagine some news organizations sitting back and waiting to see just how much of the competition goes to a pay format. If one site remains open and free, it will probably see a significant increase in traffic, and in turn see an increase in advertising revenue. It is a vicious circle that probably won’t see an end any time soon.
This also seems a bit like ‘closing the barn door after the cows got out’. Peope are used to getting the news for free on the Web right now, to ask them to now pay is going to take an awful lot of work. It is going to be interesting to see how this shakes out, but those who predict all news will go to a subscription setup are being a bit premature in their conclusions I believe.
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July 16th, 2009
Yeah, cos as we can already see with movies and music, charging for stuff on the net is such a water-tight success.
Idiots.
July 16th, 2009
Another reason to dump the mainstream media altogether. As it is most mainstream media is biased
and getting something resembling the truth is a joke. This proposal will end up hurting them.
July 16th, 2009
1999 called and wanted their idea back. Haven’t we been here before?