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

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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Professor Nunes, in your view, how does digital culture relate to the broader realm of popular culture? How has digital culture transformed our sense of what constitutes popular culture?

I think in part I was trying to address that with the area theme for Communication and Digital Culture this year. I don’t know if I can say when the change occurred — if we are even talking about a line that divided the two realms — but certainly aspects of digital culture are increasingly integrated with what we traditionally think of as mass culture or popular culture. The idea of television shows with web tie-ins or alternate reality game tie-ins, for instance, has become increasingly commonplace. There is now much more interpenetration of digital culture and popular culture.

Part of what we have been trying to address in some of our panels in the Communication and Digital Culture area is how does one define ‘mainstream’. Does it make sense to talk about ‘mainstream’ as distinct from the digital? Can we define what might be a ‘digital mainstream,’ and how we might view that? Is it about content or is it a set of practices mirroring how one interacts with media, reflecting the expectations of consumers across paradigms of convergence culture? Our panel discussions brought a lot of this, with its problematic implications, to the foreground: the idea of the changing world of what it means to be a media consumer.

Numerous panels at this conference reflect the centrality of media to culture. I’d be interested in your reflections on the extent to which theoretically and substantively media seems inseparable from culture and the ways in which we might conceptualize that relationship.

I am not a historian of popular culture, or of this organization for that matter, but I think one of the points to be foregrounded about popular culture as it is addressed within the academy is the extent to which it is tied up with the study of mass culture, and the degree to which mass media provides a grounding for mass culture in the 20th century.

Long before the rise of any kind of “new media studies” presence within the framework of popular culture studies, you certainly have numerous works on dime store novels and television and movies and comic books. There’s a well-established precedent for this overlap in the study of popular culture and the study of mass media and mass produced objects. That highly disputed division between high art and low art, between high culture and low culture, marks a nexus of sorts between media studies and cultural studies.

My interest in digital culture lies very much in that connection between these two realms, an attempt to take media studies and cultural studies and look at the ways in which they overlap. We are at this schizophrenic moment of increasing consolidation of media companies at the same time that the idea of media production is increasingly moving from a small group of individuals who have access to the production apparatus to a large group of people who may be only marginally involved in media production but who are actively engaged in consumer-producer involvements with mass media ,such as with alternate reality game tie-ins with television shows. So I think it is a very interesting moment for media studies and cultural studies. In particular, we need to be thinking media as an expression of multiple cultures, and which cultures are reflected in these expressions.

Aside from the fact that the media is the object of scholarly inquiry, how, in your view, can the worlds of professional media and academia productively engage with each other? Should the two be separate, as some might argue?

There was a presentation yesterday by Ted Gournelos as part of the first panel in the Communication and Digital Culture area, which was looking at issues of convergence culture. A number of presenters on the panel were taking a stance that was a bit oppositional to Jenkins’ definition of convergence culture. Gournelos was making the point that in contrast to the Habermasian model of consensus culture that Jenkins seems to imply in his use of the term, “convergence” must also take into account conflicts of culture and conflicting investments in the production of conflicting public spheres.

I think we are once again at a moment where there is a sort of euphoric celebration of the way in which the role of media producer and media consumer continue to blur and how that blurring might give rise to a productive and liberatory social space. And this kind of rhetoric does work its way into the academy. There is oftentimes a rather naïve celebration of the proliferation of these idealized communities — as in its older form in the mid- 1990s, as theorists “waxed utopic” over the social and cultural impact of the internet. The popular uptake of these new media interactions is depicted as a kind of mediated populism — a proliferation of democracy online. I think we are in stage 2 of that same kind of euphoric uptake that we saw a little over a decade ago. You hear it all the time in these celebrations of what it means to be involved in Web 2.0.

Some academics have valorized this as a revolutionary moment without taking into consideration things like the free labor provided by individuals who have been putting content online, and the way in which this may play into certain corporate structures. I think there is always going to be a bit of a friction between an academic approach to media and culture and the way in which media corporations are making use of media and culture. There is a degree to which the academy should provide that critical lens, that critical reflection, that calls attention to what euphoria often elides or overlooks.

That does not mean that there cannot be opportunities for interesting academic work that steps outside the ivory tower, so to speak, and has its eye toward media production. I guess I am just a little suspect of what happens when production gets melded into certain corporate ideologies or corporate strategic planning.

How might we think of the internet as a cultural and political space? The everyday perception of the internet is that it is a neutral space, which itself is an outcome of a certain kind of thinking.

Some of my earlier thinking about the internet — and I was as guilty of this as a number of other first-generation internet culture writers — reflected a willingness to look at the internet as public sphere without fully taking into consideration what it means when the public sphere is entirely subsumed within corporate or state structures.

I think right now what’s going on in China with the Tibet protests is very telling. Just the other day I heard a report on NPR: the degree to which some rather clever computer engineers in China have successfully managed to shut down external communication and internal communication in China, the degree to which the state government can filter Google and Yahoo and can completely shut down access to YouTube or other international sites that it finds questionable — this really makes the case that any strong argument for the internet as public sphere that does not take into consideration corporate structures or state structures that can override or predetermine communication is, I think, a little naïve.

Again, I don’t want to come across as saying that it is impossible to have democratic communication by way of the internet but you always need to be aware of the ways in which these political structures and informatic structures delimit what it means to have democracy online.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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