The Evolving Newsroom

The Wall Street Journal is one of the few newspapers to keep some of its content behind a paywall online (meaning you have to subscribe to read some of the stories).

This policy bucks the trend of recent years to offer everything free online for fear that your readers will just go elsewhere if you don't. A fair policy given that daily news outlets have relatively few points of difference from one another and there's no scarcity of news online.

The WSJ has rather more points of difference, however, and it seems to be doing just fine. According to a report posted by Editor& Publisher, in the last year the WSJ has nearly doubled its user-base, with a 94% increase since June 2007. The site now reaches 16.2 million users.

"The site offers a mix of free and paid content. The Journal's breaking-news alerts and personal-finance, opinion and lifestyle content, as well as videos, blogs, podcasts and other interactive elements are all available free.

"Even with a fee - print subscribers pay $49 a year for a web subscription - WSJ Online attracts more than one million subscribers and 10 million monthly unique visitors.

"In 2007, WSJ.com generated about $60 million in subscription revenue. To put this in perspective, making up that revenue in ad sales would require WSJ.com to increase traffic by more than 20 million unique monthly visitors."

Jimmy Guterman, editorial director of O'Reilly's Radar group, has bid farewell to his New York Times subscription. I think he articulates well what so many are thinking:

"It was hard to say no to the Times. The quality was high, the thump of the paper on the sidewalk was a pleasant sound to hear first thing in the morning, I liked the serendipity of walking through a print section, and I felt obligated to pay for the paper at a time when print subscribers were becoming an endangered species.

"But, after years of wavering, I'm done... What finally made me give in to the inevitable was realising, one barely-dawn morning last week when I was reading the paper at our kitchen table, that I had already read much (most?) of it online. For all the pleasure of holding and print, the Times on paper is just too late."

He goes on to say that he'd pay to read it online. "I would gladly pay for the pleasure and convenience of reading the paper online, just as I do for The Wall Street Journal, but I don't have that option. In this era of advertising-is-the-only-business-model, management at the Times Company has decided that I've decided that the value of what it sends to me is zero. I disagree."

It's an interesting argument that rumbles on. Should papers charge for online news? The Wall Street Journal looked for a while like it was going to drop its paywall, but has kept it for the most part, opening up only commentary and opinion. But most others dropped paywalls a while ago.

I've been in the keep-it-free camp for a while. For daily news, anyway. I know I wouldn't pay for access to a news website right now - I don't need any one site badly enough and there are plenty to choose from. Then again, I empathise with Guterman over the New York Times. I love it too, and would hate to see it disappear.

You know what they say about value: the more you charge for your services the more people value what you're selling. And I suspect, if I'm honest, that if the New York Times disappeared behind a paywall I'd want to get in there. But -and it's a big but - that's only because I know the site's good, and the only reason I know it's good is because I've followed bloggers' links to great content like their slide shows, video obituaries and columns. Put up a paywall and bye-bye bloggers.

I see this period as one of brand-building for news companies and staking out territory online. It doesn't seem smart to shut potential users out before they've had a chance to get to know you, and especially before you've had a chance to develop a really useful site and - importantly - services. The New York Times has an impressive site, most news organisations don't, at least not yet.

I find myself thinking quite a bit about what comes next for someone like me - a motivated, regular news consumer. Nine times out of ten I come up with a different answer, but here's today's musing.

There's Google news, of course (fed by mainstream media companies). There are non-mainstream, niche, user-generated, aggregated sites and voting. There are sites that mix it all up - raw press releases cheek by jowl with agency news feeds and UGC (user generated content). Technology makes everyone and anyone a potential news gatherer and reporter - shoot it, write it, blog it. There's news on my homepage, Facebook page, Twitter. And that's all good, as far as it goes.

But I think a trusted brand counts for a lot. Even more so as the volume of information we encounter online grows to deluge proportions. Yes, I want to be able to check out raw press releases if there's something of particular interest to me. And, yes, I'm reassured to know I can read council documents online (although that doesn't mean I will). But, no, I don't want to trawl through a dozen sites a day or spend hours going about it.

I'm busy. For the main news of the day, I want someone else to read council reports and newsfeeds and pick out the stories likely to be relevant or interesting to me. That role of filtering, sifting, selecting news is just as important as ever. And I want to know that whoever does it observes the standards I've come to value - fairness, accuracy and balance. In other words, a trusted news source.

Maybe it's not a matter of whether we should be charging for daily news online, but when. Or, more importantly, how.

Maybe the day will come when we're all so overwhelmed by information and opinion that we will be happy to shell out for timely packages of well-written news delivered how and when we want by trusted news organisations. The key, surely, will be those timely packages. I might not pay to come to your website. But I might pay for you to bring your website to me providing you can do it in an engaging, relevant, unobtrusive, timely, technologically-wow, one-click simple way.

I don't mean a daily email digest. Well, maybe a daily email digest with video bulletin, columns, blogs, lifestream feeds, quote of the day, cartoon, market data and images that show up in my inbox/inboxes (email/lifestream/feed reader/homepage/phone) and are laid out nicely and can be viewed inline (ie without having to visit your website or open a media player). A web page in my inbox, if you will (plus a tweet in my Twitter feed, a text on my phone etc). And maybe it would be an aggregated digest, let's say from the New York Times, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, NZ Herald and Viet Nam News.

Ach, I don't know. The only thing I ever paid for online was a one-year subscription to the New York Times crossword archive when I was addicted to that big, themed weekend crossword they run. But only once, and a long time ago. Also virus protection and some telephony services. That's it.

One thing I do know is that email is constant. I always check it. All day, every day. Facebook comes and goes, I rarely answer my phone, I get round to Google reader when I can. I love Twitter right now, but who knows how I'll feel about it in November? Email endures.

Any which way, today is not the day I volunteer to pay for 'online' news. But it doesn't seem as far-fetched as it once did.

There was me thinking the WSJ was going to bring its whole site out from behind the paywall. But no, so far only opinion, editorials, commentary and video. And they're still running a discount campaign enticing new subscribers.

Silicon Alley Insider thinks they may not go much further. "With this hybrid solution, the organization's columnists can now go head to head with the blogosphere (and the NYT editorial page), without giving away the farm."

Either way, the WSJ personalisation offering for subscribers has appeal. You get to track 10 companies - stock quotes and stories, 10 industries, the columnists you like and news in 10 areas (world, business, technology etc) - delivered online and by email.

The 'Are newspapers cutting their own throats by not charging for their product online?' debate grinds on. Inside most media companies the battle lines are drawn: on one side are those in favour of charging for premium services - 'we're mad to give away this great content we've made' - and on the other are those against - 'if we charge, our audience will go somewhere else'.

The Wall Street Journal, recently taken over by Rupert Murdoch, is the highest profile example of a newspaper that used to charge, and had enviable subscriber numbers, but decided to abandon it in favour of ramping up readership and selling more ads on the back of that.

Times blogger Justin Fox posts this week about the pointlessness of arguing about it. "News was already pretty close to free long before the Internet came along," he says, in response to a 'we're mad to give it away' post from LA Times business columnist David Lazarus.

"It was free on TV, free on the radio, and effectively free in newspapers when you consider all the valuable stuff that came packaged with it for 25 or 50 cents, from comics to crosswords to classifieds to supermarket ads. And unlike, say, a song - which was free on the radio but worth spending money on to be able to play again and again whenever you wanted to hear it - a day-old newspaper was usually less than worthless."

While some point to younger generations not being willing to pay for online content, Justin shows that's not the case. They buy music online happily enough, and pay for games. They just don't want to pay for news.

And neither do I. Why would I? There's no shortage of news online. If I can't read the story on one site I can read it on countless others. If I reach a paywall, I give up and go somewhere else. And don't get me started on those US sites which require you to register, albeit for free, but then don't accept your postcode because it's not local. So much for globalisation.

The point is, unless you organise a giant, worldwide news cartel to set a global price (not going to happen), you can't charge for news online. Archives, maybe, but not daily news.

Trouble is, increasingly people don't want to pay for a newspaper either. Not even the people who wail about how important quality journalism is to the health of a country. Seriously, next time someone bemoans how outsourcing/globalisation/greedy management are eroding journalistic values, ask them how often they buy the paper. Nine times out of ten, in my experience, they'll say they don't buy it at all, or they buy it once a twice a week. Not quite enough, then, to keep 'quality journalism' afloat.

So, if they're not buying the paper, and people under 35 aren't buying the paper, who is?