newspapers

SimsBlog has listed (and explained) the top 10 lies newspaper executives are telling themselves (and us). Here is the short version – but go to her blog and read the motivations:

Lie #1: We can manage this disruption from within an integrated organization.
Lie #2: Print advertising reps can sell online ads too
Lie #3: Aggregators are killing my business
Lie #4: We can re-create scarcity by putting up pay walls
Lie #5: Our readers paid for news in the past, they will again
Lie #6: There will never be enough online revenue to support our newsroom
Lie #7: No one will ever cover crime/health/city hall the way we do
Lie #8: Our readers can’t be trusted/they are idiots/they are assholes
Lie #9 Democracy will collapse without us
Lie #10: I can compete with the best digital leaders/thinkers/creators in the world without becoming an active member of the online community.

All these are important and serious but in my book the most dangerous is the myth that democracy is dependent upon print newspapers (Lie #9). This will be one of the factors media will use to demand stronger protectionism through legislation.

An example of this idea recently appeared on the Becker Posner Blog:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire News Corp reported a huge financial loss ($3.4bn). Naturally this cannot go un-commented so in today’s Guardian Murdoch is quoted as saying that quality journalism* is not cheap and the era of a free-for-all in online news was over.

So what to do? Well Murdoch’s response is to start charging for online news:

“The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.”

There may have been a time in history when newspapers could have gone the way of pay-per-view but today the free has spread. One of the reasons for the increasing losses in the print industry is not the traditional web but rather the growth of user-produced content (web2.0). Even if many of these user-producers leech of print media (as does this article since it is a reaction of what I read in the Guardian) it would be very difficult to lock down the news.

The news (whatever that term means) is spread in a number of different sources. Official, unofficial, personal, impersonal, gossip, fact, free, costly etc. But few news sources are so powerful that they can be enclosed and charge money for their content when they once have been provided for free. A pre-internet truth has always been: Any news source can be adequately filled by other news sources. The internet aggravates this by provided a seemingly infinite amount of news sources.

Even though the newspaper business is struggling with their adaption to new technology, charging readers to read their material online will fail. Any attempt by a newspaper to end free will only result in the end of that newspaper. For better or worse – free is here to stay.

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* Cannot resist reminding people that “quality journalism” provided by News Corp includes trashy tabloids like The Sun and News of the World as well as quality like The Times and Wall Street Journal.

Top 10 Lies Newspaper Execs are Telling Themselves

The end of free