Fair prices for quality journalism
Nine Things Publishers Should Do—or Avoid Doing—to Help Ensure the Survival of Quality Journalism in the Age of Web 2.0. Op-ed by Stephan Russ-Mohl, Director of the European Journalism Observatory at the University of Lugano.
The cat is out of the bag: a few days ago, Rupert Murdoch specified the price at which he would like to sell his content on the Internet in future: Users of the British Times' online offering are to pay the same daily price as people who buy the paper at the newsstand. We do not yet know whether this step will mark a turning point and end the "free for all" era, because as a courageous pioneer Murdoch does not yet know how his competitors will react. His coup can only succeed if other major publishers quickly follow his lead.
Because people in day-to-day business are in danger of losing sight of the forest for the trees, Murdoch's initiative is an opportunity to suggest nine things from the media researcher's ivory tower vantage point that publishers should do or not do in order to help quality journalism survive in the age of Web 2.0.
1: Publishers should not give away content online that they want to sell in print.
2: You should not trust that journalism can be financed 100 percent or even predominantly from advertising. Advertising may migrate to the Internet with the public, but not necessarily to the news sites - and above all, the mass business with classified ads will foreseeably collapse online in Switzerland too. Craigslist and Kijiji send their regards.
3: Publishers should pass on price advantages that result from online distribution to users. If you can save on the costs of printing, paper and delivery, you should let customers who do without the printed product share in the savings. An online subscription should therefore cost at most half as much as a print subscription. Murdoch's price for the online version of the Times is therefore too expensive!
4: Up-to-date, in-depth information is valuable and precious. If there are hundreds of new articles in a newspaper that costs two or three francs, it is absurd to charge just as much for individual old articles that readers want to fish out of the electronic archive. That is perceived as usury.
5: Quality-conscious publishers should close the floodgates for PR rather than opening them further by downsizing their editorial teams. After all, those responsible for communication on the other side are also cool calculators: why pay for expensive advertising when you can get many messages across to your target groups cheaply and credibly via editorial content?
6: Publishers should not invest in advertising and PR for their companies, brands and products without providing journalistic platforms on which media and journalistic products are reported and discussed. Without them, PR in particular comes to nothing. Quality awareness among audiences and thus also willingness to pay for media products is generated - if at all - by reliable information about media and journalism.
7: Cutting back on media journalism may be in the healthy personal interests of the media powers that be. After all, as a publisher or editor-in-chief, you don't want to be put on the spot in the same way that your own editorial team pillories politicians and CEOs from other sectors on a daily basis. However, anyone who pursues their own interests too dashingly is behaving negligently towards their own company and industry. How many fewer cars would premium suppliers such as Daimler, BMW, Audi or Porsche sell if there were no automotive websites, no motor press and no Formula 1 coverage? And another thing: we know from politicians that they usually rely more on newspaper and TV reports for information than on their ministries, research departments and secret services. Perhaps not only the public, but also editors-in-chief and media managers would benefit from solid journalistic information about the media business and their own competitors - they would poke around less in the fog and repeat fewer mistakes that have already cost a lot of money elsewhere.
8: Even though the Netzeitung has just been discontinued in Germany: Publishers who lay off qualified journalists today must expect to encounter some of them again tomorrow as competitors. The barriers to market entry in online journalism are low. And those who only operate online, i.e. who do not have to deal with printing technology, distribution logistics, works councils and trade unions, are more agile than the big tankers.
9: However, there is one supertanker that publishers have so far vastly underestimated, just as they have long underestimated Google and Craigslist: On the web, where all media are converging and news websites will have to offer podcasts and videos in addition to texts and images in the future, public broadcasting is becoming an overpowering competitor. Publishers also need more media journalism in order to achieve a fairer distribution of these billions in fees: less for sports rights, soap operas and Gottschalk shows, which can also be financed via private television; more public money for quality journalism. However, these funds should then no longer benefit just one provider, but the entire journalistic "ecosystem": regardless of whether this involves financing correspondent posts for the NZZ in Afghanistan or Iraq or investigative research by Südostschweiz or the St. Galler Tagblatt in the respective canton.
Because people in day-to-day business are in danger of losing sight of the forest for the trees, Murdoch's initiative is an opportunity to suggest nine things from the media researcher's ivory tower vantage point that publishers should do or not do in order to help quality journalism survive in the age of Web 2.0.
1: Publishers should not give away content online that they want to sell in print.
2: You should not trust that journalism can be financed 100 percent or even predominantly from advertising. Advertising may migrate to the Internet with the public, but not necessarily to the news sites - and above all, the mass business with classified ads will foreseeably collapse online in Switzerland too. Craigslist and Kijiji send their regards.
3: Publishers should pass on price advantages that result from online distribution to users. If you can save on the costs of printing, paper and delivery, you should let customers who do without the printed product share in the savings. An online subscription should therefore cost at most half as much as a print subscription. Murdoch's price for the online version of the Times is therefore too expensive!
4: Up-to-date, in-depth information is valuable and precious. If there are hundreds of new articles in a newspaper that costs two or three francs, it is absurd to charge just as much for individual old articles that readers want to fish out of the electronic archive. That is perceived as usury.
5: Quality-conscious publishers should close the floodgates for PR rather than opening them further by downsizing their editorial teams. After all, those responsible for communication on the other side are also cool calculators: why pay for expensive advertising when you can get many messages across to your target groups cheaply and credibly via editorial content?
6: Publishers should not invest in advertising and PR for their companies, brands and products without providing journalistic platforms on which media and journalistic products are reported and discussed. Without them, PR in particular comes to nothing. Quality awareness among audiences and thus also willingness to pay for media products is generated - if at all - by reliable information about media and journalism.
7: Cutting back on media journalism may be in the healthy personal interests of the media powers that be. After all, as a publisher or editor-in-chief, you don't want to be put on the spot in the same way that your own editorial team pillories politicians and CEOs from other sectors on a daily basis. However, anyone who pursues their own interests too dashingly is behaving negligently towards their own company and industry. How many fewer cars would premium suppliers such as Daimler, BMW, Audi or Porsche sell if there were no automotive websites, no motor press and no Formula 1 coverage? And another thing: we know from politicians that they usually rely more on newspaper and TV reports for information than on their ministries, research departments and secret services. Perhaps not only the public, but also editors-in-chief and media managers would benefit from solid journalistic information about the media business and their own competitors - they would poke around less in the fog and repeat fewer mistakes that have already cost a lot of money elsewhere.
8: Even though the Netzeitung has just been discontinued in Germany: Publishers who lay off qualified journalists today must expect to encounter some of them again tomorrow as competitors. The barriers to market entry in online journalism are low. And those who only operate online, i.e. who do not have to deal with printing technology, distribution logistics, works councils and trade unions, are more agile than the big tankers.
9: However, there is one supertanker that publishers have so far vastly underestimated, just as they have long underestimated Google and Craigslist: On the web, where all media are converging and news websites will have to offer podcasts and videos in addition to texts and images in the future, public broadcasting is becoming an overpowering competitor. Publishers also need more media journalism in order to achieve a fairer distribution of these billions in fees: less for sports rights, soap operas and Gottschalk shows, which can also be financed via private television; more public money for quality journalism. However, these funds should then no longer benefit just one provider, but the entire journalistic "ecosystem": regardless of whether this involves financing correspondent posts for the NZZ in Afghanistan or Iraq or investigative research by Südostschweiz or the St. Galler Tagblatt in the respective canton.
