Comments on: Research: news execs still think they have a monopoly

By: An Nguyen

An Nguyen — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:45:41 +0000

Yes, I agree. And I think this is an area where public service media will play a critically important role in the future. Despite all the fuss about their declining relevance in the digital age, public service media are all the more needed these days. But their approaches might have to be adjusted to more actively and effectively accommodate local and reginal needs. A collection of local/community news sites hosted on bbc.co.uk, with more involvement of BBC-trained and -supported citizen writers might be a good way to go. The big question, though, is still where the fund will come from.

By: John Hopkins

John Hopkins — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:33:15 +0000

You could just as easily study where such features are offered besides the newspaper site. It happens that what interests me most is where readers will learn the things they need to vote intelligently and cope with the world. There’s plenty of room for several kinds of studies.

By: Paul Bradshaw

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:46:41 +0000

@John – That would be a great study, but it would not be particularly relevant to where readers actually go when a website is closed. People buy newspapers for all sorts of reasons, including classifieds, weather, crosswords, cartoons, readers’ letters, adverts, that they will go elsewhere to get. We often seem to forget that.

By: Matt Wardman

Matt Wardman — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:53:03 +0000

I’d suggest that:

a – There *is* room for creative use of paywalls.
b – Perhaps there is a USA/UK difference – these are US figures.
c – One category that will naturally live outside paywalls is that which doesn’t have to be paid for, such as Comment is Free. Where they can trade platform profile for free content which generates a bit of revenue they will.
d – I haven’t seen any British media sites deal with the “citation” problem when they hide their most authoritative articles. e.g., This FT blog post depends on source articles behind the paywall:

http://blogs.ft.com/ftfmblog/2009/11/04/praying-for-a-market-miracle/

By: John Hopkins

John Hopkins — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:46:40 +0000

I’m not sure reader perceptions of the ease of finding alternative sources of news are necessarily accurate. Someone should design a study to find out, over a sample period of perhaps a month, how much the websites in a given community deliver, compared to the local newspaper.

By: An Nguyen

An Nguyen — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:33:00 +0000

One thing these figures seem to suggest is that Murdoch’s current desperate search for online revenues via pay walls is due to die. Interesting to see where this dilemma will lead him and his news business to.