What Little I Know…

The paid newspaper content argument seems as though it is still as strong as ever. There is no doubt that Rupert Murdoch’s aging threat to charge for some of his content online and his most recent rant to block Google from indexing his content, has led publishers to do either one of two things; Shake their head at Murdoch’s madness or try to follow suit to see if this will help their quickly disappearing margin lines. For those publishers who are doing the later, they’ve also recently been given a bit of a nudge from Microsoft, as they’ve now spread the word that they may be interested in paying publishers to use their content online – a move that Google would never contend to, for various (good) reasons.

The first newspaper that we’re aware of to make public their plan to follow in Murdoch’s footsteps of paid content access,  is Johnston Press, a publisher out of the UK.

Johnston Press plans to ask readers for €5 for a three month subscription to its online content. The challenge I see for the publisher is that they are charging for general news content online, which will be heavily based on their generalist newspaper titles. Now grant it, their web property will possess more timely and pointed news articles, but there is no specialization that leads the readers to believe that the information they would pay Johnston Press for online, is information or viewpoints that they couldn’t get anywhere else.

Without specialization of content, those wanting to charge for online access don’t have a leg to stand on. Many think that because media mogul Rupert Murdoch has started to talk of charging for online content that they too can follow suit. But publishers must remember that Murdoch will probably test this out with the Financial Times first, a specialized and coveted title, and he has been talking about doing this for over a year and every time they give a proposed start date, there seems to be some unforeseen calamity that pushes their paid content launch date out.

Publishers’, adopting a paid model isn’t that easy… especially not today. You’ve got to have the right mix of content and brand trust and recognition to make it work, otherwise, you make it increasingly difficult to build the advertiser value proposition online and the continuance of web as an ‘add on’ to a newspaper buy will live strong – a theme we strongly disagree with.  As for Johnston Press, their paid online news access strategy will be a failed one.  In a market such as the UK, assuming that you can effectively charge readers for generalist news content online is a far stretch.