This week a photographer was at my children’s school taking pictures. Inside the package that was sent home for our purchasing choice was the following “Special offer”:

“Have all the [six printed and framed] photographs for £25 and we will email the images (max 3) copyright free for just £35 extra”

Incredulously, my wife asked: “3 emailed images cost £10 more than 6 printed ones. How does that make sense?”

The more I thought about the “Special offer” the more I saw how symptomatic it was of content-based industries. Here are just 4 issues it brings up:

Don’t overvalue your content

Like newspapers who charge more for accessing one article online than they do for a whole bundle of articles in print, this photographer thinks his content is worth so much that he can charge almost 50% more for it in its ‘pure’ form.

But without the glossy paper and the framing, a school photo loses much of its symbolic charm for parents. Particularly when it is produced in the factory-line-like settings that characterise school photography (and, likewise, much journalism). He forgets that he is not selling an image, but a package.

As a content producer you may be aware of the overheads involved in producing digital content – but the consumer only sees savings: you as a producer don’t have to print it, you don’t have to package it, and indeed those costs are passed on to me as a consumer – so why are you trying to charge me more for it?

Copyright is worth nothing if it’s unenforceable

The mention of copyright in the photographer’s ‘special offer’ is a bad choice of words, for a number of reasons. Firstly, after some conversation with photographers on Twitter, I realised he was actually trying to say ‘you can send this to as many friends as you want’ but he’s using his own language, not ours as a consumer. It’s about his rights, not our benefits. Sound familiar?

Secondly, the legal overtones raise our hackles. This is a picture of our children – what are you going to do? Sell it to Corbis?

Finally, any veiled threat here is empty. If someone chooses to digitally copy and redistribute his content, the chances of him finding out about it are minimal. This is a battle he cannot win, and in raising the spectre of the law he is risking the relationship, the brand, and the service being provided.

Pricing is everything

Offer 20 parents who already have 6 printed photographs the opportunity to get 3 of them in an email for £35 and I would suggest 19 will say no.

Offer the same group of people the same opportunity at £10, and I would suggest maybe 5 will say yes. At £5, maybe 10 will say yes. At £2, maybe 18. These are estimates, but the general point is: sometimes you can make more money by charging less to more people.

In this situation the price needs to take into account – again – that you are not pricing content, but the convenience of a service. Someone will be willing to pay £5 to save themselves the trouble of scanning an image. At £35, they’ll save the money and scan it themselves if they need to.

It doesn’t matter what value you place on the content, it’s how much people are prepared to pay for it that sets the market.

Invest in new markets

The promising thing about the photographer’s ‘special offer’ is that he is thinking about new ways to sell his content beyond the printed product.

If he’s serious about this new market, then, he needs to invest in it, and in terms of strategy – not just kit.

Digital images could be used as a distribution strategy, not just a sale. He could partner with framing companies to offer premium framing options for parents and relatives online. There are all kinds of ways he could reinvent the school photography process as a package; as a service.

But if he thinks that he has the same monopoly on content that he did in the school snapshots market, he needs to think again. The barrier to entry has been lowered; and in contrast to his commodified product are a dozen community producers (let’s call them Uncle Dick with his SLR and Mum with her scanner at work and everyone in the family with a mobile phone camera) who might not have the same technical standards but care enough about what they’re doing to produce decent work that makes a connection.

It’s a metaphor being repeated in all kinds of industries, and few seem to be learning any lessons from it.

Thanks to @Sharl and @Brendadada for working these ideas through with me on Twitter

Rupert Murdoch’s comments about search engines “stealing” his newspapers’ stories, and his pledge to make sure his titles’ news is not free, has fired up the paid content argument.

In his article for The Register, Murdoch: Google is mortal and together we can kill it, Andrew Orlowski argues that Google indexes too much junk, and News International cutting off its news steams would remove quality content.

However, in a world where the BBC exists (and those of us who work in UK regional press know our local BBC newsrooms follow up our stories and present them as news sometimes weeks after the fact) and provides excellent national and international coverage, then what has Google got to lose?

“Getting to there isn’t something News Corp can do on its own. But much as they may fear him, all the commercial rivals share a common purpose – they’d dearly love him to be the battering ram, bashing down a door they could all run through,” Orlowski writes. But who will join Murdoch?

It’s not as though paywalls haven’t been tried before.
The regional daily in my own home town of Brighton experimented with paid content a few years ago. Readers could pay for a PDF of the newspaper online and the archive.
Today its online readers can read stories, archives and watch videos, which suggests the early experiment was a failure.

On November 26, Johnston Press announced paywall experiments for a number of titles in northern England and southern Scotland.
Two options are on trial, a three month subscription of £5 to view content for some titles, or readers click onto a story and are sent to a page telling them to buy the newspaper.
We will know next year if the experiment has been a success and see if it is rolled out to the company’s other titles.

Johnston Press is not along in experiencing a fall in advertising revenue during the credit crunch.
Many of its regional weekly and daily newspapers have seen a drop in print readership. As Paul Bradshaw has pointed out here, the paywall can be seen as the  logical way to keep quality, loyal readers, which advertisers will be willing to pay premium rates to reach.

In South Africa The Witness in Peitermaritzburg started operating a paywall for its local news service in early November.

In an editorial explaining why the newspaper has taken this option, deputy editor Yves Vanderhaeghen points out to readers, “Google gives you the world, but does anyone cover Maritzburg news better than The Witness? You be the judge.”

He may have a point there, but what is to stop anyone starting a news blog in Peitermaritzburg? A quick scan of the latest edition and the news story can be read online for nothing, and the newspaper won’t benefit from any advertising revenue.

Personally I don’t think paywalls are the answer. I know in my newspapers’ areas we are competing with blogs, message boards, new online “good news” papers and various twitter feeds from new news sources, which would provide our current readership with something else to read for nothing.

New media strategist Steve Yelvington sums up my personal view in his blog Thinking about a paywall? Read this first, by pointing out the majority of regional and even national news consumers are searching for the story they find on our sites.
We have our regular readers, but are they loyal enough to pay for access?

Damon Keisow has taken a closer look at Yelvington’s analysis of online readership and asks where would publishers put the paywall? Surely we want to bring people in and keep them loyal, rather than exploit them.  After all,  local, regular readers are what advertisers want to reach in regional press.

Paywall watch has been launched on Online Journalism Blog’s Facebook group with responses to questions asked earlier version of this article.

Specialist content, premium added extras and RSS feeds to iGoogle and Netvibes pages have all been mentioned as paywall content. However, when it comes down to the fundamentals of mainstream news, the general opinion is news should remain free.

The questions are:

• What are people’s thoughts about Murdoch’s aim to remove free news from the internet?

• Have you paid to read through a paywall and why?

• Do you know of or work for a publication operating a paywall? Does it work? What makes it work?

Here’s another set of questions from a student I’m publishing as part of my FAQ series:

Do you think the role of the journalist has changed in modern media and if so why? What further changes do you envisage over the next
few years?

Both questions are tackled in detail in the 6th part of my model for the 21st century newsroom. I think we have new types of information which is changing the role of the journalist, and that post sketches out how that might pan out.

Do you think investigative journalism, the old journalism, is dead?

No. And I don’t think investigative journalism is ‘the old journalism’. If you read any history of journalism you’ll find what we consider ‘investigative journalism’ to be very much an exception rather than the rule in most journalism. In fact you could argue it is exceptional by definition. Is it dead? From a global perspective, if you look at the number of investigative journalism organisations being established, you could say it actually looks very healthy. From a UK perspective, it’s mainly moving out of the newsroom and into the freelance world, into the world of activist organisations, and onto the web. It is by no means dead at all.

Is the modern journalist simply someone who collects information that already exists and puts it all together to form “news,” rather than discovering things for themselves. Is this sort of thing journalism?

This is a curious question, and I’ll try not to take it too literally because the language is unclear. I think you’re talking about the reprocessing of easy content rather than the ‘unearthing’ of it, and I think the answer is twofold: firstly, even after all the layoffs we’ve got more journalists than we ever had up until around 10-20 years ago, and that expansion of the media in recent times has seen the employment of a lot of ‘processors’ – that doesn’t mean we have fewer journalists who ‘dig’. Secondly, the availability of information has changed, as I outline in part 6 of the 21st century newsroom linked above. Your question betrays a discourse of ‘discovering things for themselves’ which needs to be critically addressed. If information that previously had to be ‘discovered’ is now more publicly available because of the web, is that information less valid?

Let me give a concrete example: does the fact that a journalist can use Google to find a government document rather than go to the library change anything about journalism?

The idea of ‘journalism’ is a complex one that covers everything from live reporting to opinion, analysis, interviewing, document analysis, editing and plenty else besides. And I’m not sure how important the question of ‘what is journalism’ is unless we’re trying to pretend it’s something amazing which, really, it isn’t.

With the advance of community journalism, twitter and the like, do we still need journalists?

I’m assuming you mean professionally paid ones? Probably yes. If we look at why the job arose in the first place it was because of a commercial and political need for information. Even with information overload that need still exists – either as a filter of all of that information, or someone who gathers the information that isn’t being gathered, or who compiles it and presents context.

On Thursday 3rd December at 10:30am,  The House of Commons Culture, Media and Sports Committee will hear from Matt Brittin (Managing Director, Google UK) and Paul Bradshaw (Lecturer in Journalism, Birmingham City University / Online Journalism Blog).

This is the sixth oral evidence session on The future for local and regional media.

For a live blog of this session, click here