- Times Online
he Times and The Sunday Times revealed their new-look websites yesterday, which from next month will be available only to those willing to pay for them, igniting the debate over how quality journalism will be funded in the future.
Last month the two newspapers announced that they were to begin charging for the online editions of their newspapers. Millions now have free access to timesonline.co.uk. From June, users will be offered a week’s subscription for £2, or a day’s access for £1, to two new sites — thetimes.co.uk and sundaytimes.co.uk.
The decision has been controversial. Those reading this article on paper have always been asked to pay, and expect to do so. Many viewing it on a screen have never been asked for money, and don’t expect to start paying now. But as Daniel Finkelstein, the executive editor of The Times, argues: “We know that people will pay for The Times, because they do. This is just about making sure they do so on all our platforms.”
Many arguments have been deployed against the move: information online “wants” to be free; no one will pay for content when decent, free, alternatives lie elsewhere; “paywalls” — when a website blocks access to a page by requiring payment — have not worked before.
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But in the debate over how to fund the Fourth Estate in the future no serious commentator has suggested that journalism can continue down its present path. One need only look at the United States, where in the past year more than 100 newspapers have shut down.
News Corporation, the parent company of The Times, has said that its other titles, The Sun and The News of the World, will begin charging for their online content later this year. Rebekah Brooks, the company’s chief executive, describes this as a “defining moment for journalism”.
James Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation Europe, put the debate in its historical context last week. He said that as far back as the 1710 Statute of Anne, which enshrined copyright, the rights of the author and creator have been recognised and protected.
“We are one of the largest employers of journalists and editors, and maintain an incomparable range of foreign correspondents, contributors and bureaux in all sorts of places,” Mr Murdoch said.
“We attach a fair value and a fair price to the journalism we produce. What is so controversial about that?”
Roy Greenslade, the veteran media commentator, wrote recently: “All eyes, here and across the world, will be on the great paywall experiment. It’s going to be a fascinating couple of months once the Wapping papers start to charge.”
In the late Nineties, the press committed its Original Sin. When newspapers launched their fledgling websites, they decided not to charge people to view them. Few could have imagined how the internet would change their industry. In that era, newspaper websites were a small operation that could easily be paid for through advertising on the sites. Even if these digital newspapers wanted to charge, they probably could not. The mechanisms and infrastructure required to take payments from people online either did not exist or were unwieldy.
Many feared, as they do today, that their growing online readership would cannibalise its print editions. At various stages in the past 15 years, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph have all experimented — mostly unsuccessfully — with charging online readers or making their users register to view their websites.
Largely, each paper has followed the same strategy — keep websites free, get the largest possible audience for them and make money through advertising sold alongside the articles. But can website advertising alone be enough to make up for the steady decline of newspaper sales? Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian, has said that increased digital advertising revenues should be able to fund content online. The evidence from Times Online, and many others in the industry, is that this is not the case.
For the foreseeable future, The Times will face a formidable “free” alternative in the BBC’s website. But the corporation’s journalism is paid for by the public who pay a licence fee of £145.50 a year. It is now for the unsubsidised press to find ways to fund its work.
Other newspapers have toyed with digital subscriptions with varying degrees of success. Both The Wall Street Journal, owned by News Corporation, and the Financial Times charge for their online editions and make a healthy profit from them. Both feature a “hybrid” model for their websites, where some of the content is free, but some is available only to paying subscribers.
Sceptics point out that both are financial newspapers, featuring “specialist” news that a business-minded audience will find valuable. Also, a significant proportion of their online subscribers put website charges on their company’s expense accounts. This, it is argued, would be harder to justify for a “general interest” newspaper such as The Times.
The Times’s digital team is optimistic that the public will find its new website compelling enough to pay for. Executives have admitted that many people may go elsewhere for news, opinion and features — but that research has shown that many will consider paying to access the Times website.
In the meantime, the public have become increasingly willing to spend money online. Figures from the BPI, the music industry group, show that singles and albums downloaded from iTunes, Apple’s digital music store, accounted for a third of all music bought last year.
This boom in web spending is replicated across the economy. Figures from IMRG, the British e-retail group, show that the online retail market in Britain is worth £50 billion.
Many also believe that the mindset of the journalism industry has now changed. “It’s perfectly possible that no one will follow the lead of The Times,” said Douglas McCabe, from Enders Analysis. “But it’s absurd to think no other paper will consider following it.”
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