Last week Rupert Murdoch announced that his newspapers would start charging for online content. One of the main challenges News Corp will face is that the majority of their competition is offering the same product for free. All of the big UK newspapers have free content, so the only hope that Murdoch has of making money is that either people are willing to pay for his content, or that his competitors start charging as well. His belief may be that eventually other newspapers will realise that they have to charge in order to make any money and that his decision will save the industry.
The big problem facing newspapers is that people can read news online for free. They no longer have to buy a newspaper to find out what’s happening in the world. The online news is more up to date, sometimes instant. The way people receive news is changing, the internet offers real time information. Blogging and micro-blogging are creating a whole new type of journalism, where anyone can report an event almost instantaneously. Blogs give us the opinions of not only a selected few journalists, but of regular people, not influenced by editors who need stories that sell.
In his book, Flat Earth News, Nick Davies explains how Fleet Street has become increasingly corrupted by the need to make money. Fewer journalists covering less space has led to a greater reliance on news and PR agencies, which has led to the rapid deterioration of the quality of our news.
The internet has simply highlighted the plight of an industry already struggling. The same news stories are repeated across all the major news outlets, usually taken from the same copy written by a single journalist at the associated press. Many people now receive their news through a Google newsfeed on their iGoogle homepage or from a real time micro-blogging feed such as Twitter. With sites such as the BBC able to offer free news as a public service, online newspapers don’t really stand much of a chance in the longterm. But far from being the fault of the internet, it is simply their inability to react to a fast changing world.
Read “Is Murdoch’s Plan to Charge for Online News Doomed?” for an excellent insight into how the subscription system could work.
