Original News and Quality Reporting Doesn't Come For Free

While the bloggers over at the Huffington Post are still bitching about not getting paid for their opinions, The Washington Post featured a great article last week that shatters myths about the future of journalism and supports why quality news and journalistic content should not be free.

I’ve always been a strong proponent of paid-for content – we pay for everything else that we need, value and want. Quality news and content should be no different.

Case in point? The Daily.

Despite many pooh-poohing The Daily when it first came out on the iPad, it represents – to me at least – the future of news and digital journalism for our always connected and ADD-stricken minds. Engaging, entertaining, easy to digest and instantly-gratifying, The Daily creates an experience while delivering news and information of value easily. The New York Times would be wise to take a lesson or three from The Daily’s playbook.

Back to The Washington Post’s article, Five myths about the future of journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, debunks the following myths:

1. The traditional news media are losing their audience.
2. Online news will be fine as soon as the advertising revenue catches up.
3. Content will always be king
4. Newspapers around the world are on the decline.
5. The solution is to focus on local news.

Other news organizations struggling to define their relevance and revenue models should also take note.

My take is that over the next 18-24 months, we’re going to see a significant shift in attitude when consumers finally recognize that you pay for what you get.

If you want quality news and reporting, not regurgitated word-vomit, you will have to pay for it.

Murdoch is at it again.

Never one for modesty, the media giant wasn’t shy about trumpeting his latest venture last week, an iPad-only daily newspaper titled, imaginatively enough, The Daily. The interesting thing about the new news toy isn’t that it is exclusive to Apple’s popular instrument. No, what’s intriguing is that it costs money.

The Daily is one of the still-rare e-publications available only by subscription – 99 cents per day for the mildly curious or occasional article hunter, or $39.99 for those who want to take the full splash. This isn’t the first time Murdoch’s erected a paywall – last summer, he built one around his prize British property, storied and popular daily The Times – which is still being um-ed and ah-ed over.

Ever since news outlets started building paywalls, the results have been mixed. Salon became significantly less popular when it introduced a pay-for-content model, winning back readership only after it dismantling its paywall piece by piece (it is now completely free again). Several years ago, the Los Angeles Times asked online visitors to pay $4.95 per month or $39.95 annually to access its CalendarLive entertainment section. Those readers answered by not reading the LA Times; many of them found such content elsewhere, like on the free pages of rival news outlets, proving that consumers are used to getting their content for free.

On the other hand, Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal has been a huge success in the pay-per-access game ever since introducing its paywall way back in the internet Dark Ages of 1997 (which was, incidentally, long before Murdoch got his hands on the paper). And over in London, The Times Online has built up a relatively modest but sturdy subscriber base. According to the company, there were over 100,000 subscribers to the paywall in December 2010, although this also counts readers who download versions to their Kindles or the paper’s app to their phones. Yet this isn’t a bad result for a system that, at the time, had been in place less than half a year.

It’s early days, still, so it’s hard to gauge how this paywall story will end. But early indications seem to be that it’s going the way traditional media always did – certain publications are finding their subscribers and building what looks to be a sustainable business model, and some aren’t. As ever, it seems that newspaper/magazine readers are willing to pay for their media, but only if it provides value for the information it conveys.

It’ll be interesting to see if The Daily, The Times, and other media outlets with paywalls can deliver that value and keep building a subscriber base that’s not fixated on all-content-for-free.

My free trial expires in two weeks, so I’ll let you know how that goes.