RUPERT MURDOCH’S DECISION to charge users to access online news across his publications is his answer to the steep decline in advertising revenue this year. While it is appealing to try to turn millions of news surfers into paying customers, how realistic is that move?
 
“It is a huge gamble,” said Stephen Jukes, former global head of news at Reuters. “If he fails, surely there will be more blood on the wall.”
 
Jukes, who is the Dean of Media School at Bournemouth University, draws a distinction between what he calls ‘news’ and ‘news’. The first is an everyday commodity, the second a value-added, exclusive product.
 
Jukes believes it is possible to charge for the value-added variety, where the reader gets more. But if it goes wrong, users would avoid clicking through to ordinary news items, and Murdoch would end up with less revenue to pay for the ‘quality journalism’ his plan aims to ensure.

Journalist-turned-academic Liisa Rohumaa is of a similar opinion. A former deputy editor at FT.com, Rohumaa has seen a monetised system work. FT.com runs a three-tier access system, the top of which is a premium-level service for £199 a year, but she doesn’t believe this business model would work for websites that do not cater to niche markets. “It’s a question of who would be prepared to pay,” she said.
 
While a financial analyst may pay for the information that FT.com provides, Rohumaa cannot see consumers approaching The Sun‘s celebrity gossip or The Times‘s general news with the same attitude. Daily news can be accessed from a plethora of sources, including citizen reports and blogs. Convincing consumers they should pay to read what they may read for free elsewhere is unrealistic.

“I think our audience are starting to realise that information isn’t just in the hands of the elite,” Rohumaa said.

Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and journalism professor at the City University of New York, thinks the decision is more than impractical. “Pinning hopes for the survival of news on charging for it,” he wrote in The Guardian, “is not only futile but possibly suicidal.”
 
By cutting content off from what he calls ‘google juice’ – the searches and links which draw users and advertisers in – publishers will not only alienate themselves from the real value of the web, they may even make less money. The escaping genie, he believes, should have been bottled up long ago.
 
Rohumaa’s thoughts exactly. The first internet browser was launched 15 years ago and newspapers have had that long to monetise their online content. “There was a chance to cash in,” Rohumaa said, “but the industry failed to see that and I can’t see it working now.”
 
Murdoch is pushing forward, though. He has announced he is looking at ways to block search engines from his content. He thinks Google and others have been acting as “parasites” and it’s time they stopped. 

Google’s response to Murdoch is this: if you don’t want to be on our search index, tell us, and we will remove you. A Google spokesman pointed out that Google News and web searches promote news organisations and bring users to their site – but only if they wanted it.
 
Professor Stuart Allan, author of Online News: Journalism and the Internet, believes the precarious relationship between news organisations and the search engine has been underestimated. He thinks charging users for news content may cause a two-tier effect across the Internet, dividing those who can pay and those who can’t.

“Such a divide would be a great shame,” he said, especially as the net is based on an ideal of access for all. While he is unsure how Murdoch’s plans will play out, he does believe any plans to charge for online news items will have a “chilling effect on the industry”.

A survey conducted by Lightspeed Research shows 91 per cent of people were unwilling to pay for news. In the same survey, five per cent said they might pay for a single news items. Only four per cent would consider a longer term subscription.
 
Vivian Schiller can relate to these figures. Schiller was head of nytimes.com when it charged for content and then stopped two years later. She thinks asking users to pay for online news is ‘mass delusion’. And yet the current executive editor of nytimes.com, Bill Keller, has announced he expects a decision to be reached soon about whether or not the website will charge for content… again.
 
The issue, it seems, stretches further than one of should or can. For news organisations losing money daily it may be a case of must. Somehow.
 
Tom Hill, journalism trainer and founder of Up to Speed Journalism, believes it is vital for the news industry to make profit and that the online product can in fact contribute to the bottom line. One of the factors to consider, he says, is the behaviour of consumers. For every rational consumer there are millions of irrational ones; imagining that they are all discerning just will not do.
 
The presentation of the online content and the way in which payment is taken are crucial. If a pay-per-view approach could be integrated with an iTunes account or something similar, users may be more willing to cross the pay wall for unique content. It needs to be what Hill describes as an ‘invisible expense’.
 
One effect of this pay-per-view model, commodifying single pieces of news, is that it will clearly show what stories users value. “Journalists are going to have to earn their spurs if they are to produce content that people are going to pay for,” Hill said.
 
While newspapers need more money, and fast, Rohumaa believes Murdoch is looking for it in the wrong place. “We shouldn’t look to online as the saviour of everything else,” she said. She believes there are other ways to recover revenue and that the search for a business model that builds truly convergent multimedia empires is the way forward.
 
Murdoch is yet to announce how exactly he plans to change the ‘malfunctioning business model’ of the web, though he has said his publications – among others, The Sun, The Times and News of the World in UK – will begin charging for content by next summer. While what that move means for the industry remains to be seen, many media observers are of the view that something must change.
 
“We will only survive if we reinvent ourselves,” Rohumaa said.

Angelica Jopson is a UK-based journalist. She can be reached at angelica.mediamind@googlemail.com

TO ASSERT THAT Britain’s regional and local press is in crisis because of the recession is to state the obvious.

But in fact, the reasons behind the crisis sweeping through newspaper titles and broadcasting alike are far more complex. We are witnessing the convergence of a series of deep rooted changes which are fundamentally reshaping today’s creative media industry. It is a mix of technological revolution, new economics and recession or, to use what has become a journalistic cliché, a perfect storm.

That storm has its origin in global trends that have been gathering pace over the past decade.

Instant communications technology has brought far reaching change which makes the Internet revolution of the 1990s look tame by comparison. Today’s generation of media consumer is, to use a phrase I will examine in detail later, a “digital native”. This means that social networking and user generated content is now the norm. News is no longer the prerogative of the chosen few journalists, it is now in the public domain. Put simply, the media are no longer in control of their destiny.

New technology has also ushered in new business models. In short, New Media equals New Economics. And while media organisations grapple with this and the still unresolved conundrum of how to make money in New Media, recession has brought the regional and local industry to its knees.Together, these trends have combined to create an unprecedented crisis that is creating lasting structural change in the industry. The greatest threat is that we are seeing less and less original reporting, a homogenised news agenda which focuses on image and sensation and a consolidation in ownership which drastically reduces the plurality of the news offering.

Of course, it is true that the digital revolution has brought new tools which are being used for the generation of news, not least mobile phone images, blogs and – the latest innovation – Twitter. But this material often does not stand up to scrutiny as news and it is no means certain that it will compensate for the growing deficit in traditional reporting.

The technological revolution

It seems incredible to think that when I started in journalism thirty years ago that I was using a typewriter, ‘sandwiches’ of paper and carbon paper which subeditors would ‘cut and paste’ into shape. By the mid-1980s, as a Reuters foreign correspondent in the Middle East covering amongst other things the Iran-Iraq war, I was struggling to master what Fleet Street was calling ‘new technology’. In my case, this was a Radio Shack Tandy 100, complete with acoustic coupler. Given a good phone line, and a bit of luck, stories could be transmitted back to London, followed of course by a phone call to see if the text had actually landed somewhere. But if the phone receiver happened to be the wrong shape and didn’t fit into the coupler, it simply wouldn’t work!

By 1989, communications were slightly more advanced but when the Berlin Wall came down we had no mobile phones to compare with today. It was a matter of holding normal telephone lines open and hoping that you could find one! But soon after that the pace started to pick up – the 1991 war against Iraq put CNN on the map, by 1996 America Online was starting to make a name for itself, and in 1988 the Drudge Report broke the story of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (although it has to be said only because Newsweek decided not to run with the story).

But the pace would quicken still further in the last eight years. The 2003 Gulf War saw television correspondents reporting live from the battle front by video phone;  and then something else changed — the ability for everyone to take and transmit images ushered in the age of user generated content or the ‘citizen journalist’. When bombers struck the London transport system on July 7, 2005, film crews couldn’t gain access to the Underground tunnels. But passengers caught up in the bombing took pictures with their mobile phones and sent them in their hundreds to the BBC and other news organisations. The same was true when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans; or when the Asian tsunami wreaked its havoc on Boxing Day 2004.

The mobile phone, in the hands of a digitally literate population, suddenly changed the relationship between the media and consumers of news. Under the old model, foreign correspondents would tell the public what they needed to know, when they ‘needed’ to know it (i.e. when it suited them). Today, consumers of news pull down what they need, when they need it and how they need it. Sometimes, as in the examples above, they have actually contributed to the news gathering.

These are today’s digital natives, a term popularised by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 2005. There he set out the dilemma facing his generation of “digital immigrants”, none other than the owners, movers and shakers of the established media organisations.

“The peculiar challenge then is for us ‘digital immigrants’ to apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges that we unfortunately have limited to no first-hand experience of dealing with,” said Murdoch.While immigrants often succeed in learning the language of their adopted country, they often retain an accent. In the digital world, the immigrant’s accent manifests itself differently but no less clearly. How often have I caught myself printing out an email to read, or ploughing through the instruction booklet of a digital camera that a digital native would simply switch on and use!

While Murdoch was pondering the generation gap and its consequences, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair was spelling out how technology had fundamentally shifted the balance of power away from the media organisations. In his parting shot at the media in June 2007, Blair spoke of “a radical change in the nature of communication.” The Media, he said, were no longer the masters of this change but its victims. He went on to bemoan the impact of web-based news, blogs and 24-hour news channels to draw the conclusion that standards were unravelling. He spoke of a “Media that increasingly, and to a dangerous degree, is driven by impact.”

“Impact,” he said, “is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed.”

More news? Or less?

So did Blair call it right? Certainly he didn’t pull his punches but nor did he really address the idea that there may be some sort of trade-off between new and old media. Clearly, instant communication is driven by image, is emotionally charged and does tend to be superficial. It caters for a short attention span and often shuns the less sensational, analytical story. On the other hand, it is certainly true that new media has brought a wealth of content we would never have otherwise seen.

There are two key questions here.

Firstly, to what extent is this user generated content news? Does it stack up when judged by traditional news values of being fair, objective and free from bias?

Secondly, does this user generated content stand alone or is it, at best, complementary to a traditional feed of news about a specific subject?

Assuming video captured on mobile phones or otherwise is genuine, and has not been doctored, it is reasonable to suggest that footage of the Asian tsunami uploaded to YouTube does pass the test of being free from bias. It simply shows what happened and offers no comment. Another strong example is the video footage of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson who died during clashes with the police at G20 demonstrations in London earlier this year. Had it not been for a U.S. investment banker, who filmed Tomlinson, the public would never have known that he was struck on the leg and pushed to the ground by a police officer. The case was taken up by The Guardian and quickly became mainstream news. Arguably this had a profound impact on the British public’s perception of policing, shattering the cosy ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ image of the friendly neighbourhood bobby.

On top of this feed of complementary news material, comes the latest technological innovation that is Twitter. By the end of June this year there were already 45 million users worldwide. News of the U.S. Airways jet’s miraculous crash landing on the River Hudson was captured by Twitter, as Janis Krum, on a ferry close to the scene ‘twittered’: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up people. Crazy.” It has become so pervasive as a medium that it seems to be almost backward not to twitter from a meeting. So much so that the Editor of Reuters, David Schlesinger, felt it necessary to remind his reporters about basic ground rules for using the new medium.

But here it is clear that we are talking about a communication medium that may not be just about news in its traditional sense. It seems that Iranian opposition figures, frustrated by the outcome of June’s re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, used Twitter to coordinate demonstrations and rallies. That in itself is a story but it serves to remind us that not all communication is news in its own right.

New economics and old-style recession

The other main factor in play is economics, both new-style and old-style. These economic forces seem to be working against the plurality and diversity of news and are combining to create the crisis in the regional and local press. The whole thrust of New Media economics is to gather the news once and produce it — and sell it — multiple times across multiple platforms. In practical terms, this means that journalists, especially on regional and local newspapers, are multi-tasking, writing a story, taking still pictures and shooting video. And then editing the package, uploading it to the website… and so it goes on. It is a classic triumph of form over content. Journalists are almost chained to the production desk, becoming factory-style processors of content rather than generators of news. So there is less and less time to gather original news.

In addition to that, the actual number of journalists is shrinking as the industry consolidates worldwide. This trend had been gathering pace over the past decade and is particularly marked in America where Disney, Viacom, AOL-Time Warner and News Corp dominate the landscape, supplemented of course by Microsoft and Google.In the UK, the same consolidation has swept through the newspaper industry. In 1992, some 200 companies owned newspapers. By 2005, 10 companies owned 74 per cent of the British regional press.

The recession has given this trend added impetus as advertising revenues plunge and organisations seek to reduce costs. In Britain, the picture in broadcasting is one of crisis. ITV has cut its news regions to eight from 17 and laid off 1,000 jobs last year. Channel Four has mounted a vigorous campaign for public finance while also shedding staff. In the middle of all this, the BBC is clearly on the back foot, defending its state funding from a series of attacks, not least in the government’s Digital Britain report. The fortunes of regional and local newspapers are even more dire. Sixty titles closed last year and well over 1,000 journalists have lost their jobs. Overall sales declined by seven per cent and advertising revenue fell by 15.8 per cent.

With hindsight, it is clear that newspapers made two fundamental strategic errors.

Firstly, newspapers believed that they could protect advertising revenue — their lifeblood — by setting up web sites. But advertisers, instead of simply transferring their business loyally across to the newspaper site found they had far more effective ways of doing business. In short, those small ads migrated to specialist web sites, for car sales and the like, which are able to draw on a far wider market and offer customers greater choice. UK newspaper advertising revenue is expected to fall further still this year, by some estimates by up to 21 per cent.

Secondly, newspapers believed that news would have a monetary value on the web. This too was wrong. So far only a handful of newspapers, particularly the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, have managed to charge customers for news. This is, to use the jargon, ‘value added’ specialist financial news, out of the mainstream commoditised pool of what is general news and widely available for free. Murdoch is now attempting to turn back the clock after 15 years of free news, stating what is frankly the obvious, namely that the current economic model is not sustainable.”Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting,” Murdoch stated recently.

But many media commentators believe that even Murdoch will not get his way this time. Sly Bailey, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, the UK’s largest newspaper publisher, posed the obvious question: “Why would you pay when you can get the same thing somewhere else for free?”

Shrinking news

The impact then of new and old economics is hugely damaging. Nick Davies, an investigative journalist with The Guardian, last year broke the taboo that dog doesn’t eat dog by writing a scathing book about the state of the media. Entitled Flat Earth News, the book sets out Davies’s central argument that less and less original news is being generated. Partly because of cost cutting, and partly because of the need for speed, fewer stories are being written, fewer stories are being checked and increasingly newspapers are falling back on agency copy (within the UK principally from the Press Association) and public relations material.

“The profession (of journalism) has become damaged to the point where most of its members are no longer able to do their job,” he writes. “They work in structures which positively prevent them discovering the truth.”

This damning verdict on the media is supported by academic research that Davies commissioned at Cardiff University. Their researchers examined the news sections of five mainstream newspapers, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Daily Mail. They found that 60 per cent of stories were wholly or partly made up copy either taken from the Press Association of from public relations agencies. A further 20 per cent of stories contained clear elements from these sources. In fact, the researchers were only able to state with any certainty that 12 per cent of the copy was original and generated by a newspaper’s own staff.

That shocking finding illustrates the extent to which the content of today’s newspapers has been reduced to a commodity and become infiltrated by PR. There is also another threat to newspapers in the form of a wave of alternative players now emerging — online only newspapers such as The Huffington Post, local council newspapers (proliferating at a rapid rate), community websites and blogs of all flavours and persuasions.

But does this proliferation of new media, much as Twitter or mobile phone pictures, compensate for the shrinkage in traditionally generated news?

In my view it does not. Not least this is because so often, these new media outlets do not offer news that passes the most basic tests of objectivity and freedom from bias. The journalist Henry Porter, who writes in the Observer, put it very succinctly in a recent article for the paper:

“All news starts off local. Without reporters dropping into a court case, pestering the manager of an NHS trust, sitting through an inquest or badgering local bobbies, democracy and accountability in Britain would not be possible…”

…the web might give you the cinema times but it won’t tell you which planning official is in bed with a supermarket chain.”

The impact of the digital revolution is now being subjected to increasing scrutiny and was the subject of a recent analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. A paper written by Andrew Currah, an Oxford lecturer specialising in the digital economy, reached an alarming conclusion:”

Increasing commercial pressure, driven by the inherent characteristics of the digital revolution, is undermining the business models that pay for news,” Currah wrote in his study, ‘What’s Happening to our News’ earlier this year.

“…this threatens to hollow out the craft of journalism and adversely impact the quality and availability of independent factual journalism in Britain.”

Change is here to stay

So where does this leave us all? Certainly the industry is still very much in state of flux or, to return to the original analogy, the storm is still raging. But I think it is safe to say that the changes we have already witnessed are here to stay.

There is a clear danger that our news today is a mile wide and an inch deep, on the face of it a huge offering but actually very shallow. Technology and economics have combined to reduce the amount of traditional news gathering. Regional news appears to be most at threat but the same processes are narrowing the scope of reporting at a national and international level.

Without doubt, technology has brought us news we would never have seen before. YouTube, Flickr and Twitter are new tools which clearly can play a role in newsgathering and do have the potential for significant social and democratic impact alongside more traditional notions of journalism. But these new tools are not at the moment fully compensating for the shrinkage in traditional news.The one clear lesson is that news in no longer the prerogative of a chosen few journalists but of the many. And the new media landscape will undoubtedly see the profession of journalism and the community of others who are generating content — of all types — working far more closely together.

Stephen Jukes, formerly the global Head of News at Reuters, is Dean, Media School, Bournemouth University. He can be reached at sjukes@bournemouth.ac.uk

A web survey carried out in March 2008 reveals editors are prepared for the multi-media revolution that will see online news overriding newspapers.
 
The second Newsroom Barometer Survey, organised by the World Editors Forum and Reuters across 120 countries, shows nearly 90 per cent of editors and executives envisage newsrooms of the future to be print and online integrated.
 
Of the 700 who responded, 83 per cent believe in five years journalists will produce content across all media platforms.
 
“The survey shows that editors-in-chief are already multi-media minded and that they have the capacity to carry out the transition from print-only to print and online,” said WEF Director and Interjunction advisory panellist Bertrand Pecquerie.
 
The survey results, published today at the Reuters headquarters in London, show 44 per cent believe news is headed online, and that print will be left behind: 28 per cent said circulation has fallen since last year, with nearly 60 per cent adding the decline in young readers is the biggest threat to newspapers.
 
The majority of 56 per cent — up from the 48 per cent of last year — also expects news to be free in the future, signalling a growing acceptance of the decline in paid-for news.

To prepare for the change, more than 80 per cent felt newsrooms need redesign. A significant proportion of editors — 53 per cent — said they already have newsrooms that facilitate staff interaction, a requirement for online and print to run smoothly side by side.
 
WEF President George Brock said: “Editors have quietly got on with the business of integrating newsrooms, but this is tempered by anxiety that newspapers are not investing enough in recruitment and training for the future.”
 
Emphasising this anxiety, respondents felt they need to hire more journalists in preparation for the required changes: 35 per cent said their main priority was to train existing journalists to cope with multi-media journalism.
 
Despite a consensus on the imminence of multi-media production, two-thirds said some editorial functions will be outsourced to keep up with an online and print product.
 
Respondents also expressed concern over how the increased demand would affect the quality of journalism. Sixty-five per cent said they didn’t think quality would improve — of which 28 per cent felt quality would in fact worsen.
 
Zogby International CEO John Zogby, whose marketing research team carried out the online survey, said: “For these editors the future is self-evident and our survey shows that they see the writing on the newsroom wall. The evolution of the fourth estate is no longer questions of if, when or how, editors now know the solution: Innovate. Integrate. Or perish.”

ALSO READ: The Newsroom Barometer results

Amy Blyth is an Interjunction staff writer.

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