So, James Harding has announced the Times will start to charge with a daily pass.
I agree: I just don’t see people paying for the kind of news which makes it into the British newspapers, at least not under this model. I can imagine–under the Allbriton model–people paying to send a journalist to a war torn area but the idea that I’ll pay for standard news is idiotic.
My sense is that Harding has got this the wrong way round–although a lot depends on the pricing points. If a day pass is significantly below the cost of the print edition (say 40 – 50p) I may well find myself grudgingly paying for it, in order to get to a recommended columnist or sports writer. If a day pass is close the print paper and the columnist is really good, I may buy the paper. (But let’s face it, I only buy the paper when I am stuck at a train station).
I might pay for access to expertise and authority though. You can charge for scarcity. So if Bill Emmott or Anatole Kaletsky is writing a column and said person is thoughtful and a veritable expert, I may well pay for it. (I buy their books after all). The Times did suggest they would keep columnists behind a paywall.
But the challenge is scarcity and the question is whether said expert wouldn’t be better of publishing directly rather than heavily intermediated (and taxed) by the newspaper’s existing cost structure. A columnist who makes, say, £200k a year (as a top columnist might) should be generating his paper £1m in revenues to cover all the overheads.
If a columnist can generate £1m a year for a newspaper, I’ll garner that managed independently, he or she could do much better than handing over 80% of his earnings to a distributor such as a newspaper. Surely they would be better being independent, perhaps charging for access to their words of wisdom and finding sponsors wanting to support the ‘Anatole Kaletsky’ community. (Or indeed launch their own fund management businesses under their brand, e..g Gavekal). Or they could find other intermediaries or distributors who might give them a better cut.
More likely–especially in Britain where top columnists are often very refined and hate discussions of lucre–the columnist won’t want the hassle. But he may use his bargaining power to increase his share of the take. And as premiership football has shown, talent costs can rapidly make your business models very highly leveraged. And with the leaky sieve, probably not something newspapers want to try.
What they need to be doing is experimenting (as I have argued before) with different models.
Of course, we only have the reported speech of James Harding’s public pronouncements. So it is hard to know exactly what News International has planned. It would make sense for them to keep us guessing.
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