What was interesting in that particular forum, is that most of discussions were centered on Fiji, as David Robie suggests:
The Fiji challenge kept bubbling to the surface, leading to a spirited debate on the future of PINA at one session and feisty calls for the regional news service Pacnews to get out of Suva at others. Fiji dominated all the speeches on the opening day with several of the region's media freedom heavyweights giving the regime a hard time - but they also warned that the young generation coming through into the industry should not be seduced by government freebies.
Ironically, while those journalists were enjoying their well-endorsed junket in Apia, oblivious to the fact that media freedom is not the central story.
It seems that, the diplomatic negotiations to the Pacific Free Trade Plan (PACER Plus) and the detrimental effects of this Trans-Tasman lobbied treaty; has somewhat not registered highly on their list of priorities; despite the notion that those negotiations affect all Pacific Island states.
Is the lack of coverage on those trades negotiations, a clear demonstration that most news published in the Pacific, is viewed through the prism of their Australian or New Zealand Publisher or Editor?
The funny thing about these Pacific media Forums is that these journalists, really don't focus much on Pacific trade negotiations with EU, US or Australia or New Zealand or even in-depth coverage of their own industry and the future trends of their profession based on the current global events like the changing landscape of the news paper business.
It's just that Freedom of the Media, is a story that elevates sales and elevated sales mean elevated circulations. SiFM fills in this lack of analytical and balanced coverage.
Last week, the Boston Globe almost filed for bankruptcy, according to New York Times article. Even the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation announced the following Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet hearing: The Future of Journalism on Weds. May 6th 2009. Video of webcast.
St Louis Today article quoted from Senator John Kerry (D-MA.)from the hearing: "The Newspaper industry appears to be an endangered species"
Another marked absence from media discussions among Pacific journalists was the story about News Corp CEO, Rupert Murdoch claiming that the era of free content on the internet is over. According to Chicago Tribune article, News Corp took a "financial beating" in the first quarter, ending in March 2009.
Guardian journalist Mark Tomasky pointed out the perceived madness of Rupert, in his blog:
Is Rupert Murdoch losing it?
Murdoch's plan to charge for access to his newspapers on the internet is a sign he's lost his touch
Comments (110)
I guess there was more important news this morning – Pakistan, the American banks – but it was Rupert Murdoch who caught my attention. I was stunned to read Andy Clark's dispatch in the Guardian this morning about Murdoch planning on charging for access to his properties on the internet.
Look, Rupe usually knows what he's doing. But this really flies in the face of common sense. He argues that the Wall Street Journal's experience proves that one can successfully charge readers for internet access to one's newspapers.
But does it? The Journal and the Financial Times, are kind of sui generis. They're financial newspapers, read by a global financial elite. You can charge global financial elites to read a tailored product of financial news.
But can you do the same with regular readers, to get them to read general-interest news? The universal experience has been that you can't.
The New York Times tried it and got hammered. It charged for so-called "Times Select" content – most prominently the paper's famous opinion columnists like Paul Krugman and David Brooks – for a little while, hoping to crowbar $50 a year out of saps like me.
It worked in my case, but there was a general hue and cry against it (not least from the columnists themselves). The paper quit charging for this premium content, and the whole experiment was chalked up a disaster.
And now Rupert thinks general readers who refused to pay for the quality New York Times are going pay for the proletarian New York Post? And the Sun and the News of the World? And for that matter the Times (your Times). If people didn't pay for our Times (the New York one – let's face it, an immeasurably better newspaper these days, such that there's utterly no comparison anymore between the two), why will they pay for yours? I just don't see it.
Maybe he's got something up his sleeve. I'm thinking about the New York Post here, a property I know quite well. I bet Murdoch would say, of the Times' experiment, that their mistake was to put the highfalutin stuff behind the pay wall. People aren't really that interested in politics.
So his bet, instead, might be on gossip and sports.
The Post has the most famous newspaper gossip page in America, Page Six. It started as, well, a page in the newspaper, and actually used to be on page six. Now it's an industry. It runs to three or four pages in the paper most days, has been moved back to page 12 or so while retaining its brand name. There's also a weekend supplement magazine under the brand, and I think there's some kind of TV deal.
It's huge. Movers and shakers in New York and Hollywood (but Washington not so much) read it religiously.
But will they still read it if they have to pay for it? With Gawker and Perez Hilton and TMZ out there? I think some will. I'm not sure tens of thousands will.
Same with sports. The Post's sports pages are terrific. But they don't strike me as being quite so terrific that people will forego several roughly-as-good free alternatives.
As for Britain, well, the only thing I can think is that he's going to put the big knockers behind the pay wall. But of course a lot of that's free on the web these days too (at least the first look).
Maybe he knows something the rest of the world doesn't. He often has. Or maybe he's just losing his touch. I was surprised also to read in Clark's piece about the jaw-dropping decline in News Corp profits. The newspaper division collapsed, and the television profits went up in smoke.
Hey, if Murdoch's right, he might introduce the rest of the world to the model that can save the newspaper once and for all. That'd be something to celebrate. Or it could be that we're getting to the end of the Murdoch era. In that case, I wouldn't cry.
On the Media(OTM), added the combined the paid online content angle, with a story that featured Associated Press's concerns about the free news stories on the internet. The OTM story feature titled "Google Me Once".
The excerpt of the story transcript:
Google Me Once
April 10, 2009
This week, the Associated Press fired a shot across the bow of news aggregation sites like Google and the Huffington Post. Without calling any site out by name, the AP said they would take legal action against websites that use their content without paying. Business Week's media columnist Jon Fine says news companies seem ready to ask consumers to pay for content again.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. And now the latest on present and future business models for monetizing the newspaper industry.
GROUP SINGING: Present and future business models for monetizing the newspaper industry.
BOB GARFIELD: The past couple of weeks have been very bad for those who believe that all content wants to be free. With a glut of online advertising inventory depressing not only online ad rates but ad rates across all media, the titans who had long traded content for eyeballs were rethinking their calculus.
News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch said, quote, “People are used to reading everything on the Net for free, and that’s going to have to change.” Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, unveiled a plan that would let people see cable programming free online, but only if they're cable subscribers in the first place. And the Associated Press, apparently disgusted with news sites like Google for selling ads adjacent to Google News aggregated from the AP and others, said, no more free lunch. If you want AP content, you need permission and you need to pay for it.
Jon Fine, media columnist for Business Week, says this had something to do with the freefall of media revenue and something to do with negotiating tactics.
JON FINE: Google and the AP have a licensing agreement. Coincidentally enough, that licensing deal is up at the end of this year. And the thing that’s starting to rankle the Associated Press, and, indeed, newspapers and content providers, broadly, is that a lot of users are perfectly happy just to go to Google News, look at the headline and the first two sentences and decide they've basically had enough; they've gotten what they need out of it.
That is not – bad word alert - monetized for the people who are making these stories.
BOB GARFIELD: You know, back in January, on this very show, the owner of Philadelphia Media Holdings, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily News, complained that he wasn't able to monetize his Web operation and said that papers have to start charging for content. Three weeks later his company was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And other voices have since come out to say, we have to charge, we have to charge, we have to charge. But - but just how? Is anyone doing that?
JON FINE: Some people are doing that. The Wall Street Journal is doing it. There are a couple of smaller examples elsewhere. There’s a website, I believe, called Packers Insider. If you’re an absolute, diehard, screaming, insane fan of the Green Bay Packers you pay five bucks a month and get every data point you could possibly want on them.
There’s a newspaper in Little Rock called The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Their site is primarily paid. The problem with that is that it’s kind of hard to extrapolate that to The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, you know, the local newspaper in Dubuque.
I think that what we're going to see a lot of is all newspapers are going to try like sort of subsites that there’s a pay wall around. It’s not like all of a sudden you won't be able to access anything on The Denver Post. It’s rather that The Denver Post or, you know, The Salt Lake City Tribune are going to try to find little areas where they can, you know, get some money out of users.
The problem is, is that it’s kind of hard to see a way where that makes a heck of a lot of money. The newspaper in Little Rock is often pointed to as kind of a success here, but I think they maybe have, gosh, you know, 5,000, 10,000 paid users. That comes to a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year, and if you are a big city newspaper that’s just not going to get you anywhere, especially when they're facing ad losses and, indeed, just losses, period.
BOB GARFIELD: The New York Times did try at one point to wall off some of its premium content with a program it called TimesSelect, changing people extra to see certain columns and so forth, finally abandoned TimesSelect because it was depressing online traffic and they needed online traffic to generate more advertising revenue.
JON FINE: I think the problem with TimesSelect was that it was kind of a half measure. Their political columnists and their foreign policy columnists aren't necessarily content areas where advertisers were dying to get next to them. Advertisers don't love hard political content, which is a problem that someone like Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post is going to run into. But they thought by doing it in a small way it could work out for them.
I'm not sure it was as enormous a failure as it was. I mean, they did get a substantial number of subscribers. They just decided they could get more the other way.
BOB GARFIELD: In the meantime, people like us have been trained that everything is for free. Can we be untrained to pay subscriptions for online content or, you know, some sort of micro-payments to buy content a la carte?
JON FINE: The problem is free is very hard to beat. If you go to an awful lot of newspaper classified websites, you can click through, they're easily searchable, they look pretty decent, whereas Craigslist, as we all know, is just this kind of like online bazaar that’s like, you know, the wall at your college where you used to tack up various garish flyers – but it’s free.
BOB GARFIELD: It’s a great price point.
JON FINE: And I think, you know, the danger is if, say, someone like The Minneapolis Star Tribune, another newspaper that’s in bankruptcy, decides to put all of their site behind a pay wall, well, there happens to be a local online news start-up called, MinPost.com - they'd be ecstatic with that. And, you know, they have reporters and they're doing similar kinds of stories, and you’re going to have that kind of free/paid dichotomy.
It’s really tricky. If it was easy to figure out, someone would have figured it out by now. I mean, did these guys make a mistake in making it free at the very beginning? You know, maybe. Maybe. Can that genie be gotten back in the bottle? Maybe, but I wouldn't want to have to bet on it. The problem is there’s not much else for these guys to bet on right now.
BOB GARFIELD: Jon, thank you so much.
JON FINE: Thanks, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: Jon Fine is contributor to CNBC and the media columnist for Business Week.
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