Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger and Sunday Times Editor John Witherow debated 'paywalls' for newspaper content during a recording for BBC Radio 4's The Media Show.
In this guest blog for the BBC College of Journalism, presenter Steve Hewlett sums up the discussion:
We will all be hearing much in the next few weeks and months about newspapers charging for content previously free online. Why? Because, in a characteristically bold (and regarded in some quarters as foolhardy) move, Rupert Murdoch is about to put all his UK newspapers' online offerings behind so-called 'paywalls'.
And, unusually for a Murdoch in British media circles, he has many people - friends and traditional foes alike - wishing him well. The fact is that long-term circulation decline and precipitous falls in advertising revenues have rendered most broadsheet business models unworkable. Revenues simply don't come close to meeting costs: to the tune of - at the Guardian/Observer on one hand and the Times/Sunday Times on the other - £100,000 and £240,000 a day respectively.
But the problem with going down the paywall route - even assuming it works in any terms and that enough people pay up to make it worthwhile in the first place (which is far from certain) - is that it runs the risk of missing out on the 'national conversation'.
The high-quality comment and analysis we get from our press feeds and informs that conversation, but it increasingly takes place elsewhere - not just pubs, clubs and living rooms but online in new, rapidly developing discursive, participative forms (think Facebook, Twitter, blogging etc). And not just writers but ultimately most of their proprietors, too, crave the attention and influence which, once behind a 'paywall', they might well lose.
Rusbridger and Witherow - with fully 30 years in the Editor's chair between them - disagree about paywalls but, interestingly, agree about something possibly more significant still. Both see the end of newsprint itself as being probably inevitable and even almost in sight.
For Rusbridger and the Guardian, with online revenues already up around £40 million a year and rising fast, it is already possible to imagine a print-free future. And for all the misty-eyed fondness for ink and hard copy you could see in both men a tangible sense that the future held substantially more by way of opportunity than threat.
:: Listen to the Media Show at 1.30pm, Wednesday 19 May on BBC Radio 4.
