Business Blogging

The future of news is a topic of heavy debate these days, particularly since the recent announcement that The Times will soon be moving to a paid content model which will charge readers £2 per week for access to the website. Other publishers will be watching the move closely.

During the initial online land-grab newspaper publishers threw a lot of their resources at winning online audiences, under the assumption that a viable business model would materialise sooner or later. So far nobody seems to have cracked the problem.

The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal operate successful paywall models, but these are special cases, providing high value, exclusive business news to the kind of readers who are more than likely to charge the subscription fee to their expense account. Whether consumers will go to the trouble of typing in their credit card details to pay for mainstream news reporting, when they could simply click on another link to get the same news elsewhere without paying, is a different matter entirely.

If The Times can make a paywall work, there will be a collective sigh of relief in newsrooms around the world.

But what if it doesn’t work, and no viable business model for news journalism can be found? Are we going to shrug our shoulders and wave farewell to an industry that simply couldn’t keep up with the modern world?

My problem with this is that quality news journalism is not just another industry, because a thriving free press is an essential ingredient of any healthy democracy. We need professional journalists and investigative reporters to help us hold those in power to account, and we should all be very worried about the prospect of losing them.

I think very soon we’re going to have to decide how much we value the contribution quality journalism makes to our society. Are we willing to let something is vital as the free press fall victim to harsh economic reality, when billions of taxpayers’ pounds, dollars and euros have been spent to prop up industries such as banking and automotive?

Clearly there are no easy answers, but if we can agree that it is essential to ensure the survival of quality journalism, then maybe we should start asking whether it deserves, in some way, to be supported by taxpayers too.