Paywalls The Springboard To Democracy

Michael Hedges June 6, 2013Follow on Twitter

As newspaper publishers met this past week in Thailand for their annual World Newspaper Congress business models were again front and center. Declining paid circulation and advertising revenues continue to plague the printed medium, except in Asia, giving attention at its fullest to the hard battle for online success. Publishers have embraced paywalls almost universally.

Despite widely reported predictions over the last thirty years the printed newspaper is far from dead. Half the world’s adult population – 2.5 billion folks – see a daily newspaper, reported the WAN-IFRA World Press Trends survey. But circulations since 2008 have declined by nearly a quarter in Western Europe, a bit more than a quarter in Eastern Europe and 13% in North America. Newspaper ad revenues have dropped by nearly identical rates in Western and Eastern Europe and plunged 42.1% in North America. (See WAN-IFRA presser and summary here).

The loss of paid classified advertising to the web – typically free access – really hurt some publishers. Others – Norway’s Schibsted, for example – have invested seriously in online classified portals. Publishers tend to keep financial details of digital investments private, lest the suffering narrative gets lost. 

“The biggest challenge for publishers continues to be how to increase the engagement of audiences on digital platforms,” said the WAN-IFRA statement. “While more than half of the digital population visit newspaper websites, newspapers are a small part of total internet consumption, representing only 7 per cent of visits, only 1.3 per cent of time spent, and only 0.9 per cent of total pages visited.”

Yep, it’s a challenge. So many cat blogs; so little time. The good digital news, arguably, is time spent with tablet devices and the printed newspaper has reached parity in the US, Germany and France.

This fragmented market, so publishers perceive, challenges the business model. “People are reading our news on a variety of devices and on aggregators as well. We should try to find a way to go where the readers are, and we should go and capture them, as long as a couple of things are respected,” noted the Les Echos (France) digital guy Frédéric Filloux at a conference session on copyright and intellectual property. “We should not give up our business model. We need to be careful that our brands are not diluted.”

But that fragmentation threat to the business model is, said WAN-IFRA CEO Vincent Peyrègne in opening remarks, “an opportunity to come back to our core mission and values: empowering free citizens by providing them with the news and information necessary to make informed decisions in society. Our role…is to facilitate the rethinking process of our value chain.”

Ah, yes, democracy and paywalls coincide. Newspaper publishers, not in business for their health, have long branded their efforts as pillars of democracy; the right to know, freedom of the press, freedom of expression. Proponents of the “culture of free” are anti-democratic, said Rupert Murdoch in 2009 as he announced a hard paywall for UK titles The Times and Sunday Times. 

Other big publishers tout the same meme. Don’t fall for the trap, wrote German media critic Stefan Niggemeier in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) (June 3) observing that big German publisher Axel Springer presents itself as “the vanguard of the digital future and savior of democracy.” Axel Springer recently put the online version of tabloid Bild behind a metered paywall and Herr Niggemeier follows everything about Bild on the award winning bildblog.de.

Niggemeier took aim at Der Freitag publisher and editor Jakob Augstein for an editorial commending the Axel Springer decision to erect the Bild paywall as “finishing off the free culture net.”

“The reader has forgotten the value of content on the web,” wrote Augstein, quoted by Niggemeier. “This is dangerous. Publishers will have to teach readers the difference between quality and quantity again.” Niggemeier was howling because Bild is, well, a classic tabloid filled with racy gossip and racier photos.

“The rescue of German democracy is now on the shoulders of Axel Springer,” Niggemeier wrote, tongue-in-cheek. “It all depends on whether enough people will spend money to read the Bild. For without paying readers there is no good journalism. And no democracy without journalism.”

Niggemeier also blast Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner for sending Bild editor-in-chief Kai Diekmann to its “outpost” in Silicon Valley “to socialize, to gain experience and to grow beards and wear hoodies. One must assume that they have actually gained valuable experience there but the staging was worth gold.” Herr Diekmann was joined in California by German Economics Minister and Vice Chancellor Philipp Rösler.

See also in ftm Knowledge

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Media Business Models Emerging

After a rough transition media business models are emerging. Challenges remain. There are Web models, mobile models, free models, pay models and a few newer models. It makes for exciting times. This ftm Knowledge file examines emerging business models and the speed-of-light changes. 137 pages PDF (January 2013)

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