From Broadsheet to Broadband.
I want to take a moment to write about Barry Coleman. I should have addressed this months ago when the decision was announced, but I wasn’t an ‘active’ blogger then and so I didn’t. I was reminded of the issue earlier this week, and also once more again tonight so I thought it would make the good basis for a post.
Barry Coleman has started charging people money to view ‘premium’ news content on his business news website NBR.co.nz. This is largely in response to Rupert Murdoch’s decision to try the same thing on with the Wall Street Journal. Can this really be a feasible business decision?
Martin Taylor has written a very interesting blog which explains that, no, Barry Coleman is not stupid, but, rather, the internet is actually broken.
Unusually, I am not going to criticise Barry Coleman for charging for content. Instead, I am going to quietly sit back and watch to see what happens. The problem with publishers at the moment is that their legacy revenues are diminishing rapidly. This is making many of them less likely to take risks online. They are instead pushing the model they have but do not necessarily LIKE. With the model they have they can charge advertisers and earn money based on the amount of traffic their websites receive. They don’t like this because it means they have to work harder to provide an environment where advertisers will be willing to serve ads.
With a successful subscription model though, a publisher would become less reliant on advertisers and would more easily be able to criticise they corporate entities they once depended on as a primary source of income. This can only ever be a positive thing for journalism.
Of course, given that antipodal business news is an incredibly niche market, they will always have to feature SOME form of advertising on their site, and yes for a long while may actually have to settle for having the majority of their digital revenue come from advertising, but if their is a chance; a glimmer of a possibility of a hope, that we could see a better quality of news journalism come from the mainstream adoption of this model then I would pay to subscribe to that service.
Or maybe I’m just being too optimistic and too idealistic.
