Is the paywall coming? Good journalism is valuable, so it can cost a little too
Stephan Russ-Mohl, head of the European Journalism Observatory at the University of Lugano, does not agree at all with the comments of his columnist colleague Oliver Reichenstein in Werbewoche No. 30/31.
Publishers have been talking about paywall for months, but no one is acting, observes U.S. media expert Alan D. Mutter. Why is that? In game theory terms, the publishers are in a prisoner's dilemma: No one knows how the others will behave. But if you are the first to risk taking the necessary step, you are dependent on your competitors following very quickly - or you will lose your online customers to the competition. Collusion, on the other hand, is not permitted under antitrust law. So much for the facts.
What is increasingly annoying is the ideologically highly charged and ultimately narrow-minded discussion about whether good journalism can or even should cost anything. Of course it can, indeed it must, if it wants to maintain or regain its independence and credibility. It is astonishing to see the naivety with which the authors of the Internet Manifesto in Germany are praising the Web as a place of freedom of domination, as if the octopuses (and new oligopolists ...) Google and Microsoft did not exist. And with what doggedness they defend the everything-for-free culture of the Internet: "More is more - there is no such thing as too much information," they claim, as if no one had a problem with info-junk and as if we didn't need professional help to keep us from drowning in the flood of news.
On top of that, even a respected and often original lateral thinker like Werbewoche columnist Oliver Reichenstein apparently expects all salvation from the state (Werbewoche No. 30/31). Certainly, the conventional extensive cross-financing of journalism via advertising no longer works. The old media companies are losing their oligopoly or monopoly positions, and thanks to search engines and social networks, the advertising industry can reach the addressees of its messages elsewhere more cheaply and more precisely than via the dinosaur media of print and television. Then the public purse, i.e. the taxpayer, should pay for journalism, suggests Reichenstein in all seriousness - and with him many concerned self-appointed defenders of the cultural asset that is the newspaper, including such prominent colleagues as the philosopher and social researcher Jürgen Habermas. As if we didn't know long ago that where the state has a monopoly on journalism, governments generally also make journalists compliant - Putin, Ghadaffi, Berlusconi & Co send their regards.
No, Mr. Reichenstein, let's fight back against the beginnings: Public broadcasters are already big and expensive enough, and not everywhere in the world have they developed a journalism culture of incorruptibility like in Switzerland. At ARD, ZDF, ORF and RAI, but even at the honorable BBC, cases of corruption and abuse of fees have increased in recent years.
Expensive private elite universities like Harvard, Stanford or Princeton, on the other hand, are not a "grotesque" even in the Internet age, dear Mr. Reichenstein, but are still "the best and the brightest" in research and also in the training of future leaders. Even these universities may only boil with water, but they gain the insights we need to further improve our quality of life and to keep the free exchange of information going.
In terms of knowledge production and distribution, they are not at all dissimilar to the recently renovated NZZ, but also to the New York Times, the Guardian, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Le Monde. Certainly, it no longer costs anything to circulate information. But it is still expensive to obtain it and to separate the relevant from the irrelevant. That's exactly what excellent journalism does, and that's exactly what there will be a market for online once the paywall goes up. The big newspaper companies can then remain what they are: Media production sites for premium content, financed not by Tom, Dick and Harry, but by smart readers. As online users, they will no longer pay for expensive and environmentally harmful printed paper and time-consuming delivery, but they will pay for first-class journalism. To a more modest, but not negligible extent, those advertisers who want to reach such elites specifically will then also find their way back to newspaper websites.
What is increasingly annoying is the ideologically highly charged and ultimately narrow-minded discussion about whether good journalism can or even should cost anything. Of course it can, indeed it must, if it wants to maintain or regain its independence and credibility. It is astonishing to see the naivety with which the authors of the Internet Manifesto in Germany are praising the Web as a place of freedom of domination, as if the octopuses (and new oligopolists ...) Google and Microsoft did not exist. And with what doggedness they defend the everything-for-free culture of the Internet: "More is more - there is no such thing as too much information," they claim, as if no one had a problem with info-junk and as if we didn't need professional help to keep us from drowning in the flood of news.
On top of that, even a respected and often original lateral thinker like Werbewoche columnist Oliver Reichenstein apparently expects all salvation from the state (Werbewoche No. 30/31). Certainly, the conventional extensive cross-financing of journalism via advertising no longer works. The old media companies are losing their oligopoly or monopoly positions, and thanks to search engines and social networks, the advertising industry can reach the addressees of its messages elsewhere more cheaply and more precisely than via the dinosaur media of print and television. Then the public purse, i.e. the taxpayer, should pay for journalism, suggests Reichenstein in all seriousness - and with him many concerned self-appointed defenders of the cultural asset that is the newspaper, including such prominent colleagues as the philosopher and social researcher Jürgen Habermas. As if we didn't know long ago that where the state has a monopoly on journalism, governments generally also make journalists compliant - Putin, Ghadaffi, Berlusconi & Co send their regards.
No, Mr. Reichenstein, let's fight back against the beginnings: Public broadcasters are already big and expensive enough, and not everywhere in the world have they developed a journalism culture of incorruptibility like in Switzerland. At ARD, ZDF, ORF and RAI, but even at the honorable BBC, cases of corruption and abuse of fees have increased in recent years.
Expensive private elite universities like Harvard, Stanford or Princeton, on the other hand, are not a "grotesque" even in the Internet age, dear Mr. Reichenstein, but are still "the best and the brightest" in research and also in the training of future leaders. Even these universities may only boil with water, but they gain the insights we need to further improve our quality of life and to keep the free exchange of information going.
In terms of knowledge production and distribution, they are not at all dissimilar to the recently renovated NZZ, but also to the New York Times, the Guardian, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Le Monde. Certainly, it no longer costs anything to circulate information. But it is still expensive to obtain it and to separate the relevant from the irrelevant. That's exactly what excellent journalism does, and that's exactly what there will be a market for online once the paywall goes up. The big newspaper companies can then remain what they are: Media production sites for premium content, financed not by Tom, Dick and Harry, but by smart readers. As online users, they will no longer pay for expensive and environmentally harmful printed paper and time-consuming delivery, but they will pay for first-class journalism. To a more modest, but not negligible extent, those advertisers who want to reach such elites specifically will then also find their way back to newspaper websites.
