All The News That’s Sh*t To Print

By Gerald McGrew on July 25, 2013 in Other

This month will go down in history as one where Fairfax management did either of these:

a) Boldly grabbed themselves by the balls and took the bravest step in their history
b) Somehow got their heads into a position to kiss their own arses goodbye

You see, they’ve decided to start charging SMH and The Age online visitors via a ‘digital paywall’. If a visitor to these sites wants to view more than thirty articles a month, or approximately one story a day, they’ll need to pay between $15 and $44 a month. Video and photo galleries will remain free.

This is all perfectly logical, sensible and not a silly idea at all, right? People have paid for newspapers for hundreds of years, so that same quality of news in a website has value, doesn’t it?

Here’s why we’re seeing either a stroke of genius or an act of madness from the bosses at Fairfax. The Internet has always been about ‘free’ stuff. Napster infamously made music free, torrents made downloading movies free, and lots of other online content is there to be had for free provided you can cop watching a few ads on the same page.

A quiet revolution has also occurred. People are happy to pay Spotify so they can have all the music they want. ‘Movies on demand’ services are charging, and doing quite nicely. Slowly but surely we’re seeing more users paying small amounts for quality online content. However, ‘the news’ has been one thing that has proven particularly tricky to generate an online buck from. And the pressure is now on. Thanks in no small part to the Internet we’ve seen print news readerships plummet and newspapers globally are closing. While millions of eyeballs have shifted rapidly to news websites, their online advertising revenue simply isn’t enough to support these traditional print behemoths.

So Fairfax is taking ‘The Big Step’ and charging online readers. They’re not the first though; The Australian did it a couple of years ago, but no one cared. Heaping on the pain is the recent opening of a local version of the UK’s heavy-hitting Guardian website. They’re not intending to charge a cent. Google’s news aggregation service is perhaps an even bigger threat, allowing users to find a free version of almost any story with a simple search. It’s safe to say that just like their overseas peers, Aussie newspaper execs are shitting their pants.

The New York Times is held up as the most successful digital paywall pioneer, starting in 2011 to much fanfare and even more derision. They (allegedly) now have almost as many digital subscribers as print customers. This is a slightly shifty metric to talk about when their number of print readers is dropping like a stone. There is also a sizable community of enterprising types who have hacked their way around the NYT’s digital paywall, and no one at the NYT is saying if they’re counted as online subscribers.

What does the future hold? Will we all be paying to read news online any day soon? Anyone running a newspaper business wouldn’t be too keen to answer this question. And having several thousand angry shareholders busting their balls couldn’t make it any easier.

Perhaps Mark Twain said it best: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”