This evening I gave a speech as part of a panel debate about the future of news – and, in particular, whether anyone will ever be convinced to pay for the news in this post-paper era. The debate was, funnily enough, organised by online news aggregator fingertips.net.

As I sat down to think about what I was going to say tonight, I was struck by the parallel with the music industry. For the past decade, I’ve been writing about the way the music industry has failed to embrace digital, and crumbled as a result. – like many journos I’ve been sitting in the sidelines lobbing bricks at The Man.

And now, we journalists are facing our own digital waterloo, and despite furious work, we find ourselves as under the same threat as the record companies. Except we have no Fergeal Sharkey to wheel out on TV – he can get away with saying that you’ve got to pay for music because if you don’t the artists won’t get paid. But who cares if the journos get paid? Most people couldn’t even name a journalist, or if they could it’s because that particular writer’s bigotry has put them on the front pages.

But the fact is that media in general is undergoing tectonic changes. They are irresistible and, despite the best efforts of certain media barons, they are irreversible.

The digital revolution
Because the fact is that we’ve been living through this glorious utopian period of digital revolution, where the message is separated from its medium. Music is no longer tied to a disc, and news is no longer tied to a paper. But that presents a bit of a problem – because humans are programmed to value those tangible things –the paper, the shiny discs – rather than the thoughts and creations they contained. Without something to hold, this work becomes valueless. But not, of course, worthless.
The internet provides an incredible distribution platform – but the ocean of information quickly flows around, through, over or under any payment gateways that are erected. So even if Google stops people from getting direct to paid content without paying, someone can report on that content: the thought you’re trying to charge for will go free. And incidentally, papers have always stolen stories and quotes from each other – it’s just now it can happen in real time.

And of course, the internet also drastically lowers the bar for entry to journalism: anyone with a computer and a broadband connection can now publish to the world – everyone is a reviewer, a commentator, and those of us who rely on being experts suddenly find that expertise is a relative term. And while we do it for a living, many do it for nothing more than kudos.

Democracy or idiocracy?
The means we’ve seen an incredible flowering of creativity, and a renewed democratic instinct in places like China and Iran – where governments are finding it increasingly difficult to control what their populations reads or says. China’s recent crackdown on Twitter, for example, took out the website – but many standalone Twitter clients remained working.

Of course, the flipside is that it’s even harder to separate truth from lie – particularly when so much of the internet’s noise concentrates around our fears and hopes. Which helps explain why, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, the climate change deniers still have a hold over our public consciousness, with last month’s survey in The Times showing that less than half believe climate change is scientific fact.

But let’s face it, even in the recently passed golden age of newspapers, it was never easy to tell cold hard news fact from emotionally manipulative half truth. Should we really get teary eyed for a Fourth Estate so dominated by a wims handful of media owners?

And let’s not forget that, just a few years ago, Rupert Murdoch led media into the free-for-all frenzy of the second internet bubble.

Even now, Murdoch isn’t saying that you can’t make money from websites – it’s just that you can’t make the sort of “serious money” that supports empires. So now he’s playing hardball with the empire builders of the new frontier, Google and Microsoft.

Technological solutions
Murdoch is also, if rumours are to be believed, planning on setting up a sort of Sky TV for online news: a package of brands, some of which are not his own, that you can only access from behind a single, unified paywall. Conde Nast and Time are among the publishers involved.

Personally, I think there’s a very small audience for online, paid for news content – at least, the stuff that’s not business critical. Especially when the BBC is doing such a good job of producing it for ‘free’.

The big opportunity for Murdoch – and the rest of us in media – is mobile. Apple’s billions of app downloads proves that people are willing to pay for personalised experiences to their mobile.

With Amazon’s Kindle apparently selling 100s of thousands every week, it seems the demand for e readers is high – and it’s no surprise that people are turning to Apple to deliver the product that gives electronic reading its ‘iPod moment’. It’s likely we will see an Apple iTablet in 2010, and when it happens you’ll have to scrape geeks like off the ceiling.

But when the sweaty-palmed, early adopter excitement dies down, I think we’ll still be a long way from mass uptake of e-readers. Because the Apple’s iTablet won’t feature an electronic ink display. E-ink screens are easy on the eye and the environment, only requiring power when you change what’s on the screen. Unfortunately, they’re black and white and can’t cope with motion. But new technology is on the near horizon to allow colour, animated e-ink screens – and, crucially, foldable ones. So you can keep a small scroll in your pocket that you open up when you want to read. Not unlike a paper.
There’s an inescapable irony in our headlong rush to replace a technology that’s served us so well for thousands of years. But, if it means we can bring the benefits of the internet to paper, I think it’ll be worth it.

Of course, none of this means that publishing will escape unscathed. On the contrary, things are going to get very tough. And as well as creating new platforms for distribution that actually make money, we in the media need to reassert the value of what we do.

Discontent

Which brings me to my final point, about that dreaded word I’ve almost managed to avoid thus far: the word is ‘content’, and I hate it. It astounds me that an industry dedicated to the power of language continues to talk about its own professionally crafted creations as ‘content’. Can you imagine the fashion industry starting to refer to haute couture as ‘packaging’?.

I’m trying to think up an alternative. But for now I’m going to suggest relying on an old stalwart: editorial. At least it suggests a process of selection and preparation. And unless we in the media value what we do, how are we going to convince others to pay for it?

If you’re still reading -well done- you might also be interested in some of my other posts:

facing the post-media world

is free good or bad?

pirates don’t kill music – lawyers do

Browse Timeline

• « Video: talking convergence on BBC2′s Working Lunch
• » VIDEO: The Future Squad’s verdict on tech in 2020

Comments ( 2 )

I use newspaper websites a lot and there is no way I would be willing to pay a subscription.

The idea started a few years back for internet sites to be paid subscription, I worked out it would have cost me a fortune to have continued in all the sites I used, now many of them allow you basic membership and you have to subscribe if you want added content.

John B Sheffield added these pithy words on May 29 10 at 1:27 pm

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