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.

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