Here’s my solution for how newspapers could charge for online news content.
They all have to agree to put their news content behind a pay-wall – NewsHub. This means taking it off their existing websites and withdrawing it from the prying eyes of Google’s robots. Yes, I know this sounds like heresy, but hear me out.
Readers could then susbscribe to the news content of individual newspapers via NewsHub or select the whole lot plus access to archives for a competitive monthly fee. This would be an immensely powerful research tool that I, for one, would be willing to pay for. It would finally give newspapers a big enough weapon to fend off the might of the taxpayer-funded BBC.
Newspapers would still retain creative control over how their content is displayed and could still benefit from advertising revenue that comes to them via NewsHub traffic. This would leave them free to concentrate on providing, original, added-value content on their branded websites and adopt whatever pay-per-view micropayment solution they fancied. News excerpts would be followed by a NewsHub link to a ‘subscribe’ page.
At the moment, giving away the crown jewels just isn’t sustainable, as everyone acknowledges. And with its newswire tie-ups Google is increasingly stealing web traffic from newspapers. It’s time the print media stood up for themselves. Going it alone ain’t going to work.
By working together the quality newspapers can demonstrate that good journalism is worth paying for. Because print, and the culture it embodies, does offer something more than other media can offer: depth. In my view a fair bit of BBC online news is quite perfunctory, coming as it does from a TV tradition. The only people who seem to break stories for the Beeb are former print journalists.
And I’m convinced that newspaper archives are a valuable untapped resource which could be easily exploited online.
This NewsHub idea – which I’m sure other people have thought about – will only work if newspapers co-operate, and that, in this most competitive of markets, is unlikely I have to admit. As David Montgomery, chief executive of Mecom said when I interviewed him recently: “Getting newspapers to co-operate is like herding cats”.
But when the Sunday Times makes the first loss in its history, the Guardian continues to lose tens of millions a year, the London Evening Standard goes free, the Observer’s future is still in doubt, and the Independent teeters on the edge of oblivion, it’s clear something radical has to be done to cope with the digital era.
Cats can be trained. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. In a circus.