What Emily said, Times to charge, Indy sold

The Times and Sunday Times announced they will start charging for online content from June at a price of one pound a day or two pounds a week.

Good news for those of us sitting comfortably on the sidelines waiting to see how Murdoch’s paywalls are going to work. Great news I imagine for competitors telegraph.co.uk and guardian.co.uk which will pick up defectors left and right. I’ll look forward to reports on progress later in the year.

Generally the paywall debate is framed around the idea that someone has to pay for quality journalism and it can’t be given away for ever. If pesky readers won’t buy newspapers anymore they’ll have to subscribe to an online news site instead.

But I like the way Emily Bell of guardian.co.uk frames it in her post about the announcement.

The recent debate has centred on the question of who will pay for quality journalism if the model on the web is free. Some of this argument ignores models that are free on the web and supporting quality journalism already, such as politico.com in the US.

Quality journalism has always benefited, though, from being very much at arm’s length from the sources that fund it. In a newspaper with classifieds at the back and crooked councillors at the front, it was not obvious that the one was paying for the other. This is no bad thing, as once the funding model becomes intrinsically linked to the actual value of the difficult and expensive news, it arguably raises the uncomfortable issue that nobody wants to pay for serious journalism because often – when it is torture, child abuse, horrific failures in social care, exploitation and corruption – it is difficult to consume. Not that the public doesn’t more broadly want to support serious journalism, it’s just that often they support it by doing the crossword or reading the TV reviews.

So the challenge for the Times, and the rest of us, in a world of fragmented media is not principally to make journalism pay, but to keep it relevant.

Jeff Jarvis weighs in, with gloves on:

Rupert Murdoch has declared surrender. The future defeated him.

By building his paywall around Times Newspapers, he has said that he has no new ideas to build advertising. He has no new ideas to build deeper and more valuable relationships with readers and will send them away if they do not pay. Even he has no new ideas to find the efficiencies the internet can bring in content creation, marketing, and delivery.

Instead, Murdoch will milk his cash cow a pound at a time, leaving his children with a dry, dead beast, the remains of his once proud if not great newspaper empire.

I used to work for Murdoch at his American magazine TV Guide. I respected his balls. It is a pity to see them gone.

I like Jarvis’s line here:

This argument I hear about paywalls comes from emotional entitlement (readers “should” pay – when did you ever see a business plan built on the verb “should”?), not hard economics.

Here in New Zealand, the NZ Herald’s John Drinnan writes that there are no plans for Murdoch-style paywalls.

In this part of the world newspaper companies say the advertiser-funded model for news websites – such as APN News & Media’s nzherald.co.nz and Fairfax’s stuff.co.nz – is likely to remain.

APN chief executive Brendan Hopkins said: “It is likely to stay – but there will be variants of it within the existing model and via hand-held devices that will go down the route of paid-for content.

“That is already happening with 40,000 people getting the nzherald website via mobile.”

The National Business Review says its pay wall erected last June has passed 8000 subscribers. NBR owner Barry Colman claimed success with a large number of subscribers renewing for a full year.

But Colman said a general news site faced bigger challenges. “It would be harder to sell when they could get it for free at a neighbouring site,” he said.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev bought The Independent for one pound.

Lebedev, who owns the Russian daily Novaya Gazeta and bought the London Evening Standard last year, becomes the fourth owner of the loss-making paper and its sister title, the Independent on Sunday, after months of negotiation with their Dublin-based publisher, Independent News & Media (INM).

INM will pay Independent Print Limited, the company set up by Lebedev to run the titles, £9.25m over the next 10 months in exchange for his assuming “all future trading liabilities and obligations”. Lebedev will be an IPL director, with his son, Evgeny, chairing the company.