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Ceri Thomas reports on how newspapers are battling for online ‘hits’.
Let’s play a game. Suppose that you’re a major record label. Does it make sense to, say, sell a CD of an artist’s music in a record store for £13.99, while at the same time letting anyone who cares to log onto a website download exactly the same music free, gratis and for nothing?
Of course it doesn’t. That’s exactly the reason why the music industry jumped on Napster and its fellows from a great height. It’s common sense.
So why are most of the world’s newspapers doing exactly that?
Almost every British daily news- paper – tabloid or broadsheet – runs a website featuring virtually its entire content. For free. This is hardly news – the Telegraph web- site is almost a decade old – but in an era of falling ad revenues online and increasing competition on the news-stand, is it really wise?
Kim Fletcher, editorial director of the Telegraph, thinks that it is. “If anything, there’s research evi- dence that having a website pushes the brand of the paper and encourages readership of the paper rather than creates a group of people who think ‘Great! We can read it for noth- ing - let’s go to the website.’”
Emily Bell, editor of the Guardian Unlimited site agrees. “Newspapers offer a tactile expe- rience, portability, foldability, and you can do the crossword with a pen on your way to work,” she observes. “There is a great deal of work which goes into putting together the ‘grammar’ of a newspaper – the pictures, head- lines and stories on page layouts –
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which I think is something people are still very happy to pay for.”
So the 600,000 registered users of, say, the Telegraph site don’t just represent over half a million readers that the ink-and-paper Telegraph (with a circulation of around 954,000) has lost?
“What we find is that the web- site provides an extra benefit to people who are already reading the newspaper,” says Fletcher. “We can direct them online for more stuff, for full versions of interviews or for the archive or whatever.”
Emily Bell goes even further, denying that the existence of the Guardian Unlimited site has any detrimental effect on sales of the paper.
“Given that the Guardian was one of the few national newspa-
pers to make gains in its circula- tion in the past year, it is certainly the case that GU has not had a negative impact.
“Our traffic has peaked at times when the paper has also enjoyed strong sales for instance in the run-up to the 2001 General Election and in the aftermath of September 11.”
Websites are an expensive business though. With both the Telegraph and the Guardian sites needing teams of around 70 people to keep them running, neither organisation can afford to ignore the cost implications of their free sites.
Specialist publications like The Wall Street Journal, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter already successfully charge subscription
fees to anyone wanting access to their full content, but their infor- mation is in some senses ‘unique’ – they don’t face competition from hundreds of other sites all offering roughly the same info to a discerning net surfer.
The newspaper sites do, which means that the best chance they have to gain revenue from their sites isn’t the news, it’s the com- ment, analysis, archives and other bells and whistles.
Already the Telegraph is beginning to charge for specialist services, like their crossword and fantasy football elements and Fletcher doesn’t rule out the pos- sibility of charging for other ele- ments of the site.
“For all journalists the big irrita- tion is that here is some fantasti- cally creative work being given away,” he says. “Only a year ago people shook their heads and said that you can’t possibly charge for anything online... Now the barriers to charging are going down.”
At present the Guardian has no plans to begin charging site users, but Bell won’t rule it out completely. “In the current eco- nomic climate we would always look at all options for diversifying our revenue streams. I think it is fair to say though, that our aim is to keep GU as widely available as possible for as long as possible.”
But how long will that be. As Fletcher points out: “No media company can run indefinitely sites that aren’t going to recoup some of the funding.”