 Monday, 06 September 2010 |
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> Guardian editor warns online newspaper sites against pay walls
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Guardian editor warns online newspaper sites against pay walls
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, warned newspapers against introducing pay walls on their news websites, by saying this could lead the industry to a “sleepwalk into oblivion”.
While delivering the “2010 Hugh Cudlipp Lecture” on 25 January, Mr Rusbridger said that charging for newspaper content on the internet would remove the industry from “a digital revolution which is allowing news organizations to engage with their readers more than ever before”.
In 2009, Rupert Murdoch had announced he would introduce charges for access to all his news websites, which include the Times, the Sunday Times and the News of the World by summer 2010. The New York Times is following the same trend, and confirmed that they would also introduce a pay wall to their website by 2011.
“It is not a digital trend”, said Mr Rusbridger, “It is a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organize themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about resisting the people who want to close down free speech.”
“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”
“If you think about journalism, not business models, you can become rather excited about the future. If you only think about business models you can scare yourself into total paralysis.”
Mr Rusbridger said it was too soon to write off online advertising as a significant source of revenue to fund journalism. His commercial colleagues are convinced that the potential revenue generated by a pay wall would be significantly lower than what the Guardian was earning in digital advertising revenues.
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