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

The recent announcement that Swindon will be the first UK town to offer free wifi to all its citizens has piqued my curiosity on a number of levels. MA Online Journalism student Andrew Brightwell first got me thinking when he pointed out that the ability for the local council (which owns a 35% stake) to sell advertising represented a new threat to the local paper.

But think beyond the immediate threat and you have an enormous opportunity here. Because offering universal wifi could present a real opportunity for publishers to recapture some of the qualities that made their print products so successful. Continue reading →

Here’s a second question I’m expecting on Thursday when I give evidence to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport committee‘s sixth evidence session on The future for local and regional media. As Google are on before me (some act to follow) and aggregators are being waved around as the Big Baddie of traditional journalism, the question’s going to be asked: are aggregators really bad? And for whom?

What is aggregation?

The first point I’ll need to pick apart is what is meant by aggregation. The biggest news aggregators are local broadcasters and national newspapers, who habitually lift stories from local newspapers to fill their newshole. ‘But we add value!’ they might cry. Yes, and so do Google News and most of the other aggregators out there: by displaying them alongside each other for context, by using algorithms to identify which ones came first or are most linked to.

Of course the biggest value that aggregators add is by driving traffic back to the original material. Given that a) around a third of traffic to a typical news site comes from search engines and aggregators and b) most news sites have visitor numbers far in excess of their print readerships it’s fair to say that aggregators are not “parasites” eating into news website traffic. A more accurate description would be symbiotes, using content for mutual benefit.

Much of the objections to aggregators appear to me to come down to control and monopoly: Google is making a lot out of advertising, and newspapers are not. That’s simply the result of a competitor doing something better than you, which is selling advertising.

They do not sell that against newspaper content, they sell it against their index, and their functionality. A good analogy is map-makers: the owners of Tussaud’s Waxwork Museum don’t sue mapmakers for making money from featuring their attraction in their map, because visitors still have to go into the museum to enjoy its content. (And yes, any website publisher can instantly take itself off Google with a simple script anyway).

A second objection, it feels to me, comes from the fact that Google actually makes it much easier for you to bypass the parasites of the news industry who pass off other people’s hard work as their own, and go straight to the source. So if a local paper has a story you can read that instead of the national newspaper’s rewrite; if a scientific organisation did the research you can read that instead of the sensationalist write-up; the politician’s statement can be read in full, not out of context.

Is it good for consumers? Bad for journalists?

For the reasons given above, I don’t feel that aggregators are bad for consumers, although it would be over-simplistic to suggest they are therefore purely good. Aggregators require a different media literacy and are subject to the oddities of a selection process based on mathematical formula. In short, it’s not worse, or better, just different. But as a potential avenue to more information around a story, as well as a way of highlighting just how much news organisations reproduce the same material, I welcome them.

As for local journalists, aggregators don’t make things worse. In terms of their work processes, journalists benefit from aggregation by being able to find out information more quickly and efficiently. The downside, of course, is that so can their readers and so rewriting copy from elsewhere becomes less appropriate. Journalists have to add value, which seems to me a better and more rewarding use of their skills. On a basic level that might be through becoming expert aggregators themselves – better than the algorithms – or it may be by adding extra information, context or analysis that they can see is missing elsewhere. Either way, I can’t see how that is a bad thing.

But these are just my thoughts on the question of aggregation and their influence on the news industry. I’d welcome other perspectives as I prepare my responses.