Rob Blackhurst

British Journalism Review

September 1, 2005

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Against the odds, the dope-addled 1970s' rallying cry of "information just

wants to be free" has triumphed. News executives, surveying their sales

figures among the young, must have turned whiter than the hair of a

Woodstock veteran. The unmentionable fact stalking newsrooms

throughout the world is that hardly anyone under the age of 25 is interested

in paying for their news. According to a survey by the Online Publishers

Association of America, only 3 per cent of American 16-24 year olds see

newspapers as their first or second choice of media. At the age around which

upstanding citizens used to develop a lifetime's newspaper buying habit, the

young are slipping from the grasp of the accountants into cyberspace:

Carnegie Corporation research shows that 44 per cent of 18-to-34-year-olds

say that, for news, they use websites at least once a day.

Those who aren't online are developing a taste for free newspapers. In

London, the circulation of the Metro– with its no-frills combination of wire

reports and celebrity news and reasonably objective reporting – almost

certainly contributed to a slump in the Evening Standard's circulation. As Don

Berry wrote in the last issue of the BJR while bemoaning the expanding

availability of free news, the Standard retaliated with the free Standard Lite,

distributed from 11.30am to 2.30pm each day. And when the pitches for the

new paper given the go-ahead by Mayor Ken Livingstone are announced,

London's commuters will be on the verge of even more news – if not views –

that arrives absolutely free.

comforting argument that free news is a London-centric trend

sustained by its armies of advertisers has been trashed by the spread of the

Metro franchise across Europe and throughout Britain's major cities, and the

Lite phenomena has now reached Manchester, with a free edition of the

venerable Manchester Evening News. Metro makes the 65p spent on a

broadsheet, and 30p-plus on a tabloid, seem like a waste of money because it

is perfectly designed for a young market on the move. Its short boxes of text

suit a generation brought up with online snippets of information (even front-

page stories are only a digestible 250 or so words). At fewer than 50 pages,

Metro is around half the bulk of the Daily Mail and two-thirds the size of The

Independent – and therefore ideally suited to kill time on a 45-minute

commute. Unlike a broadsheet, Metro doesn't make demands on the

concentration – it can be combined with listening to an I-pod, the

distractions of a hot and noisy tube carriage, and half-dozing on the journey

home.

Metro collapses the already thin membrane between high and lowbrow

news and appeals across a wide demographic span. For example, the London

Metroof 28 July combined straight-bat coverage of the arrest of a London

bombing suspect (Suicide bombs: suspect caught) with tabloid coverage of a

freakish crime in the U.S. (Dead woman shot in her coffin). With features

ranging from posh al fresco eating (How to cook a lobster) to the career of

cult Mancunian musician Mark E Smith, it was impossible to tell whether it

owed more to The Guardianor Daily Mail.

Standard Lite feels even more of a gift. Containing the same content as the

early paid-for edition, apart from columnists and celebrity interviews, it

manages to retain the Standard's authentic upwardly-mobile accent. Metro's

desire to please all audiences can sometimes make it feel pallid and

anonymous, but Standard Lite seems to be as well plugged in to London's

synapses as its parent.

Just as annual fees for credit cards disappeared almost overnight under

market pressure, so a large middle swathe of the British newspaper market

may be forced to dispense with a cover price over the next few decades.

Perhaps we'll see a whole stable of free-sheets with different political and

demographic complexions. Paid-for newspapers could still flourish in such a

world, but they may well be limited to niches in the market. It's easy to

imagine a future for the FTand Guardian as paid-for titles among a blizzard of

free-sheets. But the middle-market tabloids will come under serious

pressure. As the free news shock-wave gains momentum, new papers, such as

the next London free-sheet, may have to try harder by including the star-

name columnists and celebrity interviews that have so far been confined to

the paid-for press. Would young and budget-conscious commuters then even

contemplate spending £275 pounds a year buying a daily quality paper, or

£100 regularly reading an evening title? That sort of money buys, at least, a

brace of return tickets for two on easyJet.

In his article, Don Berry worried that the reliance on wire copy in free-

sheets could be a death sentence for original and expensive journalism.

Perhaps. Personally I wonder how many commuters really will notice the

difference. A generation reared on the web and TV broadcast news – where

second-hand information constantly circulates – have a very post-modern

attitude to the originality of content. They are more interested in a précis of

the top 20 stories of the day than they are in applauding exclusives. And in a

news culture where new developments in first-edition stories immediately

sink into the 24-hour news brew, even the biggest scoops don't stay exclusive

for more than a few minutes.

If it's not death by free news-sheet for the paid-for press, then it might be

death by online news portals – just as long as they're free too. Rupert

Murdoch believes he will be able to tempt us to pay for content online. In his

speech to the American Society of Editors earlier this year he claimed: "Our

industry has the potential to reshape itself, and to be healthier than ever

before." He thinks news organisations will just have to be ingenious in

extracting cash from customers who migrate to the web – usually by, in web-

speak, charging them for "personalising" and "localising" coverage. But why

will the under-30s ever part with a pound to get a news story that they could

ingest by turning on Sky News?

Since the heady days of the late 1990s, investors have hoped that a digital

El Dorado was around the corner if they could just get the "offer" right. But

sites such as Guardian Unlimited – now on the verge of profit – are making

their money from online advertising and referral fees rather than through

payments from readers. Simon Waldman, Guardian director of digital

publishing, says: "Over the last year there has been a wave of spectacular

growth in online advertising. Charging for content is less of a critical success

factor than two or three years ago. This really is an advertising market now."

Publications that do charge for their mainstream web content have so far

made derisory profits – hardly worth losing the worldwide branding that

comes with giving everything away. And those that have charged for content

that was previously free have seen their audiences evaporate. When the Irish

Times began to charge for its website, it managed to sign up only 6000

subscribers from the million who had been using it free. El Pais tried to turn

back the vast sea of free content, insisting that its content was valuable and

worth paying for while predicting that 90 per cent of its web traffic would be

lost. Bloggers, with their fingers on the digital pulse, have long realised that

charging for mainstream content is suicidal and now attract an ever-

increasing number of hits from those who want a news, opinion and gossip

service that doesn't require them to dip into their pockets.

There are, of course, examples of newspapers charging successfully for

online content, but those are normally niche services rather than generalised

news and comment. Richard Burton from Telegraph.co.uk says: "People will

pay where there are real areas of exclusivity and speciality – where

information is quite a commodity. In our case it was Fantasy Football."

Over the last year, British newspaper websites have attempted to charge for those

few parts of newspapers that readers would rather pay for than lose.

Crosswords and word-puzzles have been unlikely money-spinners. The

Guardian has tentatively started charging for its comprehensive round-up and

preview of the next day's edition. Its digital edition – in which the paper can

be downloaded in the same format as on the newsstands – is also pay-per-

view, although the fact that The Guardian admits it is "never going to be a mass

market phenomenon" implies that sales haven't so far been meteoric. The

Daily Mail and The Independent are either braver or crazier – charging for their

columnists. Perhaps The Independent's Robert Fisk, with his cult status in

Middle Eastern souks and British student bars, may just provide a "niche

service". But it's hard to imagine that the paper's lesser names will prove to

be cash cows.

A success online

Business sites such as those of the Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal

successfully charge for financial stories where breaking news has a high

market value. And The New York Times, which has already made a success of

online subscriptions, has announced that from this autumn it will charge

$49.95 for access to its stable ofcommentators. This would not translate well

into the British newspaper market, according to Stephen Coleman, professor

of internet studies at the Oxford Internet Institute. He said: "Charging can

work with distinct communities, like East Coast Liberals, who, even if they

are not living in New York, identify with the values of The New York Times."

Besieged U.S. liberals are starved of content in a news media swarming with

reactionary shock-jocks and middlebrow regional papers. In the absence of a

public service broadcaster such as the BBC, they may be forced to pay for

their daily fix.

It would be stupid not to admit that the "something for nothing" culture

holds risks if we care about well-funded and original journalism, free from the

stranglehold of advertisers. But when media greybeards such as Roy

Greenslade worry that "free papers, or papers sold for nothing, create in the

public mind a feeling that it isn't worth paying for their daily read", they are

overestimating the media's own ability to control social trends. The media

can no more fight this "something for nothing" culture by condemning free

news than video rental stores can stay in business by refusing to stock DVDs.

Whenever barriers are placed in the way of web-users seeking mainstream

content – be they pesky registration forms or demands for cash – they will

simply go elsewhere. If every newspaper website in Britain removed free

content, readers wouldn't concede defeat and summon the local paperboy.

They'd look at the BBC website. And if the BBC became pay-per-view, they'd

go to U.S. websites. Online, there's always somewhere else.

The dark truth for newspapers is that their sales would be in serious

decline even if Tim Berners-Lee had never invented the internet and Metro

was still an idea on the whiteboard. As Telegraph.co.uk's Burton, says: "No

one has shown me evidence that the internet is making us lose print sales."

And those newspapers that enthusiastically embraced free web content early

on, such as The Guardian, find their combined web and print circulations in a

healthier position than had they continued only to force-feed readers with

slabs of Times New Roman. The Guardian's circulation would have fallen far

further if it hadn't built up brand loyalty among students with its cluster of

excellent sites. Alan Rusbridger's strategy of making sure – "in an uncertain

environment, if and when we find a way of making money out of the net we

are in a strong position" – looks to have paid off. This early investment

prevented a haemorrhaging of public sector advertising to specialist sites.

Now, after a decade, an avalanche of new advertising revenue is finally seeing

these sites turn in a profit. With Bill Gates predicting that the internet will

attract $30billion in advertising revenue annually within the next three

years, free content paid for by advertising looks like the only business model

in town for online newspapers.

Complaints about "giving away" content assume that the only

competition newspapers face is from free-sheets and from their own websites.

But the choice isn't between giving away a paper and selling one, as the free-

sheet critics assume. It's between giving it away and losing young readers

altogether. With billions of facts just a double click away, the media can no

longer assume that young readers will turn to newspapers at all – even if

they're free. The assumption that the "general reader" should take an

interest in a wide span of subjects – on which newspapers depend – is

evaporating as technology allows us to retreat into our own specialist groups.

Whether you're interested in the future of foundation hospitals, the

dressing-room machinations ofthe EastEnders cast or the politics of Pakistan,

you can now keep track of them by setting up a Google alert that will send

you an e-mail every time a relevant piece of information appears online. Who

needs to leafthrough endless newspapers?

Online we snack on small mouthfuls of information – which are not

necessarily best provided even by the online newspapers. A survey of the

media habits ofyoung Americans showed that internet portals providing 24-

hour news streams, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, were the most

frequently cited sources of news. Constant grazing makes us lose our respect

for mere words. The freewheeling online experience – opening three

browsers at once and never finishing an article – punctures the authority of

newspapers. Even visually, online newspapers feel less important. On the

printed page broadsheets have a sense of theatre – from the huge flapping

pages to the leader columns designed with a grandeur as if they've been

chipped from stone. The same piece of text on a website feels as disposable as

any other piece of information floating in the ether.

The difference of attitude

This trashy attitude could not be more different from the way in which

those who are aged 60 or above treat the printed word. My two surviving

grandparents, in their 90s, and from very different class backgrounds, both

start at the beginning of a newspaper and read it all until they reach the

sports pages. I have failed in my attempts to persuade my grandmother to

move from the Daily Mail(where she complains about the celebrity gossip) to

The Times, because she can't stand the thought ofpaying for a business section

she would throw away every day. This sense of austerity is combined with a

sense ofcivic duty, in that they feel they must keep up with public affairs even

if they don't particularly enjoy them. Compared to my generation, they are

media puritans who believe the reading of papers is a prerequisite if one is to

exercise a vote. Since 75 per cent of over-65s voted in this year's General

Election compared with only 37 per cent of 18-24 year olds, it's obvious that

civic motivation is disappearing fast. If the under-30s read newspapers, it is

for entertainment rather than as a daily ritual – and the papers are competing

for their attention with everything from fiction to DVDs, iPods and digital

TV. The weekend broadsheet newspaper "package", with tips on colonic

irrigation nestling cheek-by-jowl with a Coldplay album review and offers of

weekend breaks in Cologne, is an acknowledgement that news on its own

isn't enough to sell newspapers.

There is a glimmer of hope for pay-per-view fetishists. Digital editions of

online newspapers could become far easier to read on a new generation of

high-resolution portable electronic readers weighing less than a pound. The

combination of a fashion accessory (iPod) with cheap and user-friendly

downloads (iTunes) has already persuaded the web generation to buy music

that they had previously enjoyed free. Perhaps if we are charged 10p an article

rather than a pound – and the reading technology comes in a range of iPod-

esque sexy colours – then my web generation might begin to unlearn its

freeloading habits.

Rob Blackhurst is a freelance journalist, aged 29.