Over the last few months Rupert Murdoch has displayed uncharacteristic shilly-shallying over whether or not to charge for online access to the contents of his mainstream papers. (He already charges for digital access to the specialist Wall Street Journal.) It has finally been announced through Times editor, James Harding that his paper – along with other News Corp titles around the world – will definitely be charging for access to online journalism from Spring 2010.
   Old Rumplechops has many regrettable traits, but being a fool isn’t one of them, and it’s hard to argue with the logic of his response to the reality that any serious commercial news medium must generate enough income to pay for quality news gathering (overlooking for a moment the high costs and penalties incurred by one of News Corp’s more disreputable British titles as a result of the systematic invasion of privacy, subterfuge, incitement to crime and plain old phone-screwing that has passed as news gathering for years under former managing editor, Stuart Kuttner).
   It is inevitable that any reliable and responsibly operated news organisation, in order to survive, will, in the end, have to charge for its product however it is disseminated. And most serious news consumers won’t object. Many already buy fewer hard-copy newspapers each week than they used to, and top up with online editions for free. But those who want to continue to receive quality news, independent analysis and opinion will accept that, in the absence of sufficient advertising revenue to fill the vastly greater space and choices available to advertisers online, it has to be paid for somehow.

Where Harding and (presumably) Murdoch are wrong is in insisting that pay-per-item isn’t the way. He says they’ll offer long term subscriptions, or a daily rate. But this doesn’t reflect the way people now use web news services. They are more promiscuous in their relationship with online news purveyors than they are with the hard copy news they buy. (For example, the Guardian is the online best-seller among British papers, with nearly 33m. worldwide unique online users while it has a hard copy circulation of just 300,000 , compared with the Daily Telegraph’s circulation of c.800,000 with 31m. online users, and the Daily Mail’s huge 2,000,000 circulation and 30m. unique worldwide users.)
As the option to view several different versions or perspectives is there, the users do take advantage of it.
It’s likely that the ultimate means of charging and collecting revenue from online visitors will consist of users signing up to a general news service provider, that will allow then into whichever paper they want to visit, having paid into the single service an advance sum on account of incremental payments of say, 15p per article which the service distributes to the newspapers used.
Multiple subscriptions would be time-consuming and tedious to maintain; most people wouldn’t bother to sign up to everything for that reason. But using a central hub and payment platform, they would be able to access anything from the Tablet, the Spectator or the Telegraph, to the Mail or the News of the World.
Inevitably, some publications – like the Guardian, which already has a very successful online presence – will do better than others, and the competitive incentive for continuing to deliver high-quality, trustworthy news will be as strong as ever.
In practical terms, someone currently spending £15 a week on printed papers and weeklies would be able, for the same money, to access 100 separate articles from the whole range of titles on offer in their newsagent – probably more than most would consume in seven days.
I couldn’t find any logic in Harding’s assertion that “with article-only economics, you will find yourself writing a lot more about Britney Spears and a lot less about Tamils in Northern Sri Lanka.” In case he hadn’t noticed, this is precisely what already separates the Broadsheets from the Tabloids, and has done ever since anyone first noticed the difference.
Regrettably, the single biggest obstacle to the success of online news charging, however achieved, has been widely identified as the BBC’s online news service, which of course doesn’t have to compete for advertising income, because its news gathering operation is funded by the Licence Fee. It can and has been argued that providing free online services is not part of the Corporation’s remit under the terms of their broadcasting charter. After all, they’ve never offered the Radio Times free to all licence holders.
A brave government must address this anomaly by disallowing the BBC to offer this free service, except perhaps in the most basic, headline terms, for if this doesn’t happen, we may well witness within a decade or so in this country the death through lack of resources of the strong, independent news providers we currently have – online and on paper.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Today the PCC has published its biggest report so far since the new chairperson, the almost invisible Baroness Buscombe took over from bombastic banana skin skier Christopher Meyer.
As anyone who has watched this lily-livered organisation in action would expect, it manages no more than a pale watery light grey wash over the misdeeds of News International’s old harridan of a rag, the News of the World.
They are happy to publish the feeble denials issued by little Colin Myler, gibbering fall guy in the Screws post-Coulson era, over their hacking of the Princes’ voicemails.
Nick Davies at Mediaguardian isn’t quite right when he says today that it hadn’t been revealed before that the paper had hacked into the royal phones until Assistant Commissioner at the Met, John Yates, pressed by Adam Price, admitted it to the Culture, Media, Sport Committee on September 2nd.
In my book, News of the world? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings, in May 2008, I refer to a story – “Fury after he ogled lapdancer’s boobs” – in which the paper produces a verbatim transcript of a jokey message left by Prince William on Prince Harry’s voicemail. I posited that, unless the paper had just made it up, the only way it could have been obtained the story was through illegal phone-tapping, and, while they are past-masters at creative embellishment, it was inconceivable that they would have risked making up a personal royal story like this.
Subsequent revelations about the timing of police investigations into the activities of News of the World royal editor, Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator contracted by the paper to gather information (although in this case, paid directly in cash by Goodman) have established that the Royal Household were aware of this reporter’s activities by the time the story was published, and therefore the message was likely to have been a kite deliberately flown to confirm their findings. From this, it was clear to anyone investigating events that the paper had indeed hacked the princes’ voicemails.
The PCC’s report on the subject doesn’t address the fact that the by-line on the “Lapdancer’s boobs” story was shared by Clive Goodman and Neville Thurlbeck, a senior reporter who has been involved in many different methods of gathering personal stories. Although in last year’s High Court hearing over Max Mosley’s claim against the paper, Thurlbeck denied that he had any idea where the Royal story had come from, it was beyond the credibility of most observers that he would have been unaware of the illegal manner in which the key element of the story had been acquired. Along with an email obtained and revealed by Nick Davies last July which directly implicated Thurlbeck, this more than suggests that Clive Goodman was by no means the only journalist on the News of the World involved in phone-hacking.
The PCC seem to have accepted the evidence given them by Colin Myler, the current editor, that the story which contained the transcript of a voicemail message was in fact a conversation. Although self-evidently not based on a ‘conversation’, had it been, the paper would have been guilty of an even more serious breach of privacy, by hacking into a live conversation. Presumably aware of this, Myler made the extraordinary claim that their source was not phone-hacking, but a dancer called Annabella at Spearmint Rhino. How she would have had access to a transcript of a phone conversation between the two princes is not explained. This is an entirely new version of the grounds on which the story was based. Certainly Neville Thurlbeck hadn’t thought of using it when questioned in the High Court last year.
Absurdly, though, the PCC has used this highly questionable evidence of Myler’s to discredit the Guardian’s report.

The PCC also omitted in their summary of evidence given to the CMS committee by Gordon Taylor’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, to pursue further his statement [quoted from CMS Com website]:
Detective Sergeant Mark Maberly said to me, “You are not having everything but we will give you enough on Taylor to hang them.” …… He also mentioned the number of people whose phones had been hacked….. they had found there were something like 6,000 people who were involved. It was not clear to me whether that was 6,000 phones which had been hacked, or 6,000 people including the people who had left messages.
The PCC didn’t contact or question DS Maberly. That the PCC in their attempt to discredit the Guardian’s report have chosen to ignore such clear evidence demonstrates once again their unfitness – or simple unwillingness – to carry out the function of press self-regulation for which they were set up.
They also showed an alarming lack of determination in failing to question Andy Coulson who was editor while all the royal phone hacking was going on – either now, or (because he had “left the industry”) after the conviction of Goodman. Given his extraordinary denial to the CMS committee last July that he knew anything about the story which had been flagged on the front page and filled page 7 of an edition that he had edited, it seems imprudent, to say the least, to have overlooked any part he might have played.

Popularity: 2% [?]

An unlikely common factor links two men exposed to much public gaze this week. MPs’ scourge, Sir Christopher Kelly, was, you may be surprised to hear, an affable, jokey B-streamer in the same year as I at Beaumont, the now defunct Jesuit establishment that we both attended. A year or two above us in the school was the less effusive Ely Calil. Calil is also a neighbour of my London roost, the Chelsea Arts Club, though I haven’t seen him in there yet. Neither of these alumni were among the dwindling numbers of Old Boys who attended their annual meat-and-two-veg at the East India Club last week – and I mean ‘old’; the Jesuits lost interest in running English public schools and closed Beaumont in 1966. They sold the freehold 21 years later, cashing in substantially on its proximity to the M25, and all the people who coughed up in answer to an appeal in 1960 to extend the school never saw a penny back. “Jesuitical”, or what?

Popularity: 1% [?]

The greatest ever increase in organised crime in the history of the US was sparked by making a popular drug illegal. When Prohibition was lifted in 1933, and alcohol use made legal once more, the nation’s most potent cause of crime was removed.
    Similarly, in this country, if all drugs were, like alcohol and tobacco, available legally, a very significant proportion (some estimate half) of the causes of crime in the UK would be removed at stroke, the incentive for dealers to create new users would be removed, and fewer people would die from using adulterated drugs and dirty needles. At the same time, some kind of control could be brought to bear over the funding of the Taliban in Afghanistan by the cultivation of a crop massively overpriced only because of its illegality. 
    The decriminalisation of all drugs is [as Evan Davies might put it] a no-brainer.

Popularity: 1% [?]