Eideard

More than 100,000 people have paid to go behind the Times and Sunday Times’ new online paywalls but visits to their websites have fallen by about 87%.

Times Online was registering about 21 million unique users a month to its front page earlier this year but the figure fell to 2.7 million last month…

Times editor James Harding said the papers were “hugely encouraged“…

The subscription figures have been eagerly awaited by publishers and advertisers since the two papers went behind an online paywall four months ago…

BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas said many people in the industry had been sceptical about the paywall move, and that there would be intense analysis and debate over the significance of the figures…

The interviews with Rupert Murdoch flunkies toe the party line, e.g., anything for “free” is economic suicide. Someone really must explain that to Google or, say, Saatchi & Co..

No – Murdoch’s not feeling sorry for himself, yet
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

If you are reading this article on a printed copy of the Guardian, what you have in your hand will, just 15 years from now, look as archaic as a Western Union telegram does today. In less than 50 years, according to Clay Shirky, it won’t exist at all. The reason, he says, is very simple, and very obvious: if you are 25 or younger, you’re probably already reading this on your computer screen. “And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds…”

His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned – and so it came to pass. Dozens of American newspapers closed last year, while several others, such as the Christian Science Monitor, moved their entire operation online. The business model of the traditional print newspaper, according to Shirky, is doomed; the monopoly on news it has enjoyed ever since the invention of the printing press has become an industrial dodo. Rupert Murdoch has just begun charging for online access to the Times – and Shirky is confident the experiment will fail.

“Everyone’s waiting to see what will happen with the paywall – it’s the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don’t think the numbers add up.” But then, interestingly, he goes on, “Here’s what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they’re critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn’t want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times…”

Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less, Shirky concludes, than revolutionary…

“The final thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.”

RTFA. Interesting, provocative. Having wandered through this cyber-landscape for a larger number of years than either the protagonist or antagonist – I’ve been online since 1983 – I have a passing acquaintance at least with each facet of the discussion.

Like Shirky, I agree with him because I want to. Though that’s an equal part reflection from someone who is a hermit in real life as much as online.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The Times and the Sunday Times are to start charging for content online in June. Users will be charged £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription for access to both papers’ websites.

The News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, implied in a statement that its other titles, the Sun and the News of the World, would follow…

The Times and the Sunday Times are the first UK papers to fully charge for digital content. While a daily payment will give users access to both sites, the weekly subscription will also include an e-paper and new applications. Access to the digital services will be included in the seven-day subscriptions of print customers to the Times and the Sunday Times…

In August 2009, Rupert Murdoch announced that he would introduce charges for all his newspapers, saying that News Corp wanted to prevent readers moving to free sites by making its content better and differentiated from other publishers.

He obviously feels he can milk a useful amount of money from online readers who prefer his flavor of conservative balderdash over more traditional flavors. Maybe Flash and sports is enough?

Har.

The BBC has today said it has “no intention” of charging for online news, in a declaration that is unlikely to please James Murdoch and his father Rupert as they prepare to start charging for News Corporation content on the internet.

Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC Trust chairman, said the corporation has “no intention of diluting BBC commitment to universal access to free news online” as he outlined the areas director general Mark Thompson’s ongoing strategic review will cover.

The BBC’s internet news operations came under fire in August at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival from James Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation in Europe and Asia, who accused the corporation of “throttling” the market and preventing its competitors from launching or expanding their own services online.

News International, the News Corp subsidiary that owns the company’s British newspapers, including the Sun and the Times, is planning to start charging for its journalism online.

Lyons said today that the BBC Trust “recognises external concerns over scale and growth of BBC online operations”. But he added: “Equally, it’s an immensely popular service with audiences and an important tool for the economy…”

One would hope the Beeb also realizes their reach is well beyond the UK or the Dominion. They have an intact newsgathering organization that is replacing the role of many other news media operations – that have become dedicated to News as Entertainment. Which requires little or no journalistic skill.

Just ask anyone who used to enjoy CNN.