Will Buteman move to charge for online news?
published this on 12:32 pm, Monday, 30th November, 2009Business| Community News| Newspapers | Comments (rss) | Respond | Ping |
The Johnston Press, owners of The Buteman serving the Isle of Bute, has decided to start charging for local news online.
This policy is beginning with a trial using six of the company’s titles:
- The Carrick Gazette
- The Southern Reporter
- The Northumberland Gazette
- The Whitby Gazette
- The Ripley & Heanor News
- The Worksop Guardian
It is understood that the websites will carry ‘taster’ items and require site visitors who want to read full stories either to take out a 3 month subscription for £5 or buy the newspapers.
The BBC website says that Johnston Press’s Scottish national flagship, The Scotsman, already ‘operates a similar system for readers wishing to view “premium content” on its site’ – but we were not aware of that and can find no obvious trace of it on The Scotsman’s website.
The issue of whether or not people will pay for online news is the hot topic in the media world. Newspapers have been losing circulation over the past few decades, a process accelerated by mass migration to the web, with its huge attractions of immediacy and largely universal accessibility. Advertising revenue has naturally followed viewers to the Internet so the press finds itself between the rock of falling circulation and the hard place of falling advertising revenues – a vicious rather than a virtuous circle.
It is generally agreed that local newspapers will survive the longest. However, an online audience is not the same as the hard copy audience whose support for local newspapers is at the heart of this popular wisdom.
We would guess that Johnton Press thinks it is testing the water with the most devoted audiences. This may not be precisely the case.
It will also be interesting in Argyll and Bute if, now or later, The Buteman becomes the first to ask people to pay for its online news service.
If, say, the independent Dunoon Observer were to take this route, this would be the cost picture. The weekly paper currently costs 65p. The cost of buying the hard copy paper for a 3 month or 13 week period is £8.45. A 3 month online subscription to a fully developed news service would, by the Johnston press model, cost £5 – a significant saving of almost 49%.
The big question is not only would people pay for the service but would existing buyers of the hard copy switch to the online service?
It is far from impossible that this move might actually lose revenue overall.
On the news of the Johnston Press move, the print union, National Union of Journalists (NUJ) made the sharp point that any news paper aiming to charge for its online service will have to deliver universally first class journalism – a development the union would obviously welcome.
We ourselves remain unconvinced that people will pay for online news. There will always be online sources of news on anything and most people enjoy the sense of achievement in tracking it down – free. But we’ll see.
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November 30th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Regarding the Buteman, will it matter !
Has it stands there’s very little in the Buteman to start with and they don’t call it the 2 minute silence for nothing.
If enough copy can be found then it should be in the papar and not held back for the inter net. The danger becomes that we will have a dumbed down printed version of the inter net, more people will migrate to the net and there will come a point that printing a paper will become financialy unviable, leading to local job losses.
December 1st, 2009 at 11:49 am
Started by that most unpleasant Aussie, Rupert Murdoch, who seems to think that the drivel his organisation collects is actually worth something. I don’t buy any of his papers and I won’t pay for the contents of his web sites. I don’t buy any Johnston Press titles either, nor will I bother with their web sites. I do buy the Oban Times and the ‘squeek’ – mainly out of loyalty – and it can be fun. A three minutes silence.
Most ‘real news’ is unpleasant, depressing and unnecessarily raises the anxiety levels of the nation. I’m not going to pay to feel like that – the stuff’s available free (well, discounting the Television tax – er, licence) whether I want it or not.
So, goodbye Johnston Press. Goodbye, Mr. Murdoch. Close the door on your way out.