If you don’t pay for news, you’ll be left with the ABC

THERE’s a reason why you should pay for commercial news, and it’s not so the big companies can line their pockets, writes MATT CUNNINGHAM

Paying for news means you’re paying for quality journalism

“THE NT News. I am not impressed at how you are trying to make us subscribe and pay to read your articles that you post on public platforms. Can you please explain to me why I have to pay to read articles?”

This comment was posted recently on the NT News Facebook page. It’s likely the author is too young to remember a time when the only way to get printed news was to pay for it. But it’s a question that – in this modern media world where so much information is available at no cost – deserves an answer.

Here’s the easiest way to put this; if you owned a business which spent money and resources producing a product, would you then be happy to give that product away for free?

Of course not. And a newspaper — be it a printed one or an online publication — is no different.

For decades newspapers operated under a pretty simple business model.

Journalists wrote stories that were printed in the newspaper. Readers then paid a small price for the newspaper so they could read these stories and advertisers bought space on those same pages to market their products to the same readers.

Then the internet happened — and perhaps more significantly, the smartphone arrived.

Suddenly people had access to all kinds of information from all around the world in the palm of their hand.

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Most in the newspaper industry were too slow to react to this fancy new internet thing.

We were captured by the fact we could now reach a whole new audience and started making our content available free on the world wide web.

We viewed our success by the number of clicks our articles received or the number of Facebook followers we were able to accumulate.

As a result, we helped train our audience to believe that news was something they shouldn’t have to pay for.

According to research conducted this year by the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre most news consumers now say paywall barriers are annoying and news should be free.

There was the occasional exception to this news free-for-all.

In 2012 I travelled to Little Rock Arkansas and visited the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

In about 2001 the newspaper’s owner had been startled by a conversation he’d had with a local businessman who’d thanked him for making the paper’s content available for free on the internet.

As a result, he said, he’d been able to cancel his newspaper subscription.

The owner of the Democrat-Gazette went in to work the next day and set about ensuring none of its content could be accessed without payment.

All of the stories on its website were put behind a hard paywall. Eleven years later, as other newspapers in the area saw their print circulation decline by up to 50 per cent, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was one of the few papers in the western world to see its sales increase.

But in Australia, even the few who had put in a paywall faced an added challenge.

This was pointed out to me by Ross McPherson when I presented my findings from my trip to Arkansas at a newspaper conference in 2013. McPherson is executive chairman of the McPherson Media Group which publishes 13 local newspapers in regional Victoria and New South Wales.

He’d also implemented a hard paywall in the early 2000s, but was continually frustrated the ABC was effectively able to give away for free a similar product to the one he was trying to charge for.

Imagine owning a bakery, then having the government open one next door where it gives bread away for free.

How many loaves do you think you’d sell? Sure, if the commercial media dies, there will still be the ABC, but is a singular, state-owned organisation the best model for presenting a diverse range of news and opinions?

As newsrooms, particularly those in regional areas, shrink amid this changing media landscape, it might pay to consider where we’ll get our news if commercial news operations ceased to exist.

What sort of local news will be available to us through social media?

Right now, the NT Government spends several hundred thousand dollars of taxpayers’ money each year on a team that follows around its ministers filming nice little videos of their media events.

All the controversial questions and bits that make them look bad are edited out before the videos are posted on Facebook.

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If you’re happy for this to pass for news, you should have no fear there will be any less of it landing in your Facebook feed in the years to come.

But if you believe that news is what somebody, somewhere, doesn’t want published, it might pay you to subscribe to a newspaper like this one.

Perhaps the question shouldn’t be “why do I have to pay?”, but “what will happen if I don’t?”.