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The Wire’s David Simon: Newspapers must charge for web content

Valerie | 04 Aug 2009, 13:08

(Getty Images)

Recent calls by the creator of The Wire, David Simon for newspapers to consider charging for access to content to rescue what he as previously described as an “imploding industry” are a timely reminder of the unprecedented challenges facing the newspaper industry.

The Guardian Group has this week warned that a closure of the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper was being actively considered as a solution to turn around heavy losses from falling advertising revenues, whilst last week’s results issued by FT publishing paint a similarly bleak picture, with reports that profits fell 40 percent in the first half of the year.  So could charging for content be the answer to reversing their fortunes?

Speaking to the Independent, Simon acknowledges the inevitability of charging for content and argues that the future of journalism depends on its providers building pay walls and charging a small price for online subscriptions.

His views have invoked the wrath of new media evangelists, who believe free content is the essence of the internet. To critics however who argue “you don’t understand the internet”, he counters: “you don’t understand journalism” and poses the question: “Are newspapers weaker or stronger for having given it away for free?”

Looking at the FT results and despite first appearances as this blog observes, the FT actually turned a profit which “in the current circumstances, with virtually all serious newspapers in Britain and the States losing money, is a remarkable performance.” The fact that digital income now accounts for 20 percent of its revenues, increasing from 14% in 2007 goes some way towards validating the virtues of paid-for content.

With a recent study confirming that consumers are now spending more time with paid content, including subscription based websites, e-books and video games, than they do with ad-supported media, such as newspapers and magazines – the time is ripe for newspapers to make the leap of faith and secure the industry’s survival in the digital age.

The British Library: Building the digital future

Valerie | 03 Aug 2009, 08:00

C&binet comment: Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library

Dame Lynne Brindley has led the way in the British Library’s engagement with the digital environment. Here, she outlines its response to the recent Digital Britain report and explains the key areas that are vital to ensuring the continuing relevance of the British Library in the UK’s transition to a digital society.

Every year nearly half a million people use the Reading Rooms of the British Library at St Pancras. As they cross the Library’s piazza our Readers walk over, literally, the intellectual and cultural memory of this nation – held securely in 200 miles of shelves beneath the ground and accessible for all today and into the future.

They also pass Paolozzi’s wonderful statue of Sir Isaac Newton, who famously wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

Certainly creativity – along with research and innovation – does not simply emerge from nowhere: it thrives on learning and being inspired by ‘giants’; it is often achieved in a dense dialogue with the past; and it frequently depends on what Will Hutton has called a ‘propitious public infrastructure’, an investment made over the centuries which provides the UK with a rich basis for its successful creative and cultural industries, and for its scientific endeavours.

The physical British Library is full to overflowing today with individuals creating new knowledge, being inspired, setting up new businesses, discovering more about themselves. Journalists, film and television producers, scholars, musicians, students, budding entrepreneurs, authors – fill our spaces with purposeful activity, generating societal and economic value.

However, in a rich, complex, multi-media world of the Internet, with unbounded opportunities for new kinds of creativity, how do we continue to ensure our relevance as we make the transition to a firmly Digital Britain? How do we ensure we remain globally competitive, innovative, prosperous and engaged?

I believe that the British Library’s contribution to Digital Britain will focus on three key areas. Firstly, we need to develop our role as public custodian and guarantor of sustainable access to quality content. At the British Library we can help deliver a truly digital future for Britain by growing faster our role as custodian of Digital Britain’s collective memory - a critical public service that acts as a springboard for research and education, for new forms of creativity, and for knowledge creation.

Without investment in such services, future researchers and citizens will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century. Without a guaranteed long-term commitment to analogue and digital preservation, there will be no giants’ shoulders to stand on, and our content and creative industries will be inhibited in their global market success.

Secondly, we need to digitise legacy content on a mass scale as a key infrastructural benefit for education, creativity and competitiveness. Innovative business models are the key to success and I want to see more experimentation with new models for funding content creation and digitisation.

A superb recent example was the public launch of our 19th Century British Newspapers website (http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs), developed in partnership with JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and Gale. The service has made two million historic newspaper pages available online to researchers and the hybrid business model demonstrates the benefits of adopting a public-private approach for large-scale digitisation.

Finally, we need to support the development of widespread digital literacy skills to ensure inclusiveness and optimal exploitation of new opportunities. We may get the infrastructure and the content envisaged by Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, but if we do not have proficiency to exploit the opportunities, such investment will have been wasted. Our research is suggesting that while young people demonstrate an ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read, are promiscuous in their information seeking and do not possess the critical skills to assess the information they find on the Web.

The British Library and JISC have recently commissioned a second study, into the research behaviour of the current generation of post-graduate doctoral students – classed by their age as ‘Generation Y’ – to gain insights into their changing research behaviours during the course of three years of doctoral study.

Such insights should inform our approach to digital literacy over the next decade as we seek to consolidate and build upon our position as a key creative and increasingly digital economy – particularly in the light of our many competitors’ efforts to do the same.

See: http://www.bl.uk/digital