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Times Online tells staff its paywall nearing rollout. Roll up for trials.

0 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , March 18th, 2010 @ 7:30 pm

So here it comes. The Times Online paywall is set to be launched. Thanks to our friends at paidContent:UK for Stephen Brook’s posting today that reported News International Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks told staff that readers registered with Times Online will be invited to register for an “exclusive preview of the new digital proposition” this week.

Let me not just repeat Brook’s posting. Go over and have a look for yourself. However, I will repeat the memo reportedly sent to News International staff today, and which will be distributed to Times Online registered users.

FAIR PRICING FOR DIGITAL CONTENT

Message from Rebekah Brooks
Those of you that subscribe to The Times and The Sunday Times or have registered on Times Online will receive a communication starting from this week inviting you to register for an exclusive preview of the new digital proposition. This shows that we are getting closer to the launch of the titles’ new digital sites.
I have made no secret of our intention to start charging for quality journalism online.  As you may have seen speculation in the media about our plans, I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know why we believe this is such an important development.
We are committed to producing quality journalism that is written by professionals with a profound understanding of their subject and a commitment to provide well-informed coverage of the issues. Each of our titles, in its own way, has pioneered quality, professional journalism and we are unashamed to say we believe it has value.
In contrast, the industry is making the mistake of chasing millions of unique users by giving the audience more and more content for free. An obsession with traffic just doesn’t pay.

Great journalism needs investment and we are committed to supporting the fantastic work that you are all producing and delivering to our audiences. It is the quality of the journalism that you create, and the ways in which we produce and distribute it, that will continue to set our titles apart from the competition.
And to be clear, when we talk about charging for our content online, we are talking about charging a fair price. Price alone will not be a barrier to take up.  Of course, we expect to see the numbers of unique users of our sites come down dramatically. But the people who register to our new digital products will be customers who have made a positive decision to pay a fair price for journalism that they value, and they will be those who are more committed to and engaged with our titles.
This is an exciting development for our company especially as we will be among the first in the world to take this step. There are many who declare we have set ourselves an impossible task. But our company loves nothing more than challenging the status quo.
Shortly I will update you on our plans in more detail. But, in the meantime, I believe that with the combined force of your talent, commitment and hard work, we will, in the months and years to come, define a new future in the way we create, deliver and profit from our journalism.
Rebekah Brooks
Chief Executive, News International

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News International confirms banning NewsNow crawlers from linking

0 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized, journalism, media, news, newspapers, online revenue Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , January 13th, 2010 @ 5:14 pm
Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive O...

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Following on from my earlier post that The Times Online had barred aggregator NewsNow.co.uk from crawling its website, it seems News International as a whole has the bit firmly between its teeth and has also banned the linking service from crawling any of its newspaper sites including including The Sun Online and the News of the World.

The Guardian reported News International as saying:

“We’ve been in communication with NewsNow for several months. We asked them to remove our content repeatedly from their indexing,” said a News International spokesperson. “Now, we will update our files accordingly for all our titles.”

“NewsNow has been using Times Online content as part of its paid-for, commercial as well as free services. They have continued to do so despite our direct requests for them to stop. As a result, we have taken the decision to disallow their indexing of our content,” the company said in a statement.

“News International makes a significant investment in journalism and we believe that it is entirely appropriate for us to ask that our rights are respected. NewsNow has acknowledged that they require our permission to use our content and, in the absence of our permission, has ceased to do so.

News International owner Rupert Murdoch and other media organisations, including UK newspapers and the Associated Press (AP), accuse NewsNow and other news aggregators such as Google and Microsoft, of being parasites and insist they should pay for access to news content. While Google quietly stopped indexing AP news shortly before Christmas, the News International action represents the first live bullets in what is destined to be a significant battle over the right to link and the basic building blocks of the Internet‘s interconnected world.

For the moment NewsNow seems to have been singled out. From where I sit, I wonder whether the relatively small UK-based operation represents a soft target for a posturing Mr Murdoch as he tries to find ways to bolster declining circulation and revenues at his major titles?

The really big target would be Google, but here the trade off between losing the opportunity to monetise traffic driven by the search giant while trying to unilaterally build online revenue from brand loyal readers sounds a little trickier. Is this a case of wanting it both ways, or will Murdoch eventually put his money where his mouth is and try and hold back the tide of internet traffic by hitting the big boys?

Come on chaps, play the game. The financial woes afflicting newspapers and their general inability to generate meaningful online revenues are not the fault of third party aggregators, who afterall, are driving traffic to their websites. The challenge here is to adapt and develop new business models that can thrive in a new digital world. Yes, it is not cheap to produce original news, but unfortunately it is not a rare commodity. Newspapers needs to find ways to engage with ther communities, not cast themselves adrift.

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NewsNow blocked by The Times, faces new restrictions in right to link

1 comment By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized, journalism, news, newspapers, online revenue Tagged with , , , , , , , , , January 8th, 2010 @ 3:54 pm

The battle of the aggregators and news providers deepened today, with UK service NewsNow.co.uk saying News International had barred it from being able to link to any content on Times Online.

The increasingly bitter confrontation over the right to link to freely available news content threatens to set precedents that fly in the face of the natural development of the Internet and the the World Wide Web where growth thrives on the easy exchange of information in an increasingly connected world.

News International owner Rupert Murdoch has had a real beef with news aggregators — including Google and Microsoft. They are, he says, parasites that steal premium content beyond what would be governed by fair use. NewsNow has been facing a concerted action from the major UK newspapers that want to stop commercial content aggregators linking to their news. Against this back drop are tumbling print newspaper revenues and titles struggling to monetise their content online.

Struan Bartlett, Managing Director and Chairman of NewsNow says his service has been singled out

“It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out.

We note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”

At the end of last year, the UK national newspaper copyright body the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), imposed a scheme that introduced the requirement to obtain permission and pay fees to circulate links to freely available web pages. The scheme has been referred to the Copyright Tribunal. NewsNow stopped offering links to UK newspapers as part of its premium subscription services, but continued to offer links in its free services.

My view is clear on this issue. Yes, online revenue comes from having content, but also, most importantly, generating as much traffic as possible. To use a simple analogy, if a road is blocked off traffic does not drive down to have a look, but instead seeks an alternate route to get to its destination. If newspapers are struggling to build online models that deliver healthly dollops of cash from general news content, the one thing they must do is look for ways to monetise traffic.

For the cynics among you, here is The Times online singing the praises of NewsNow in 2006.

NewsNow is also behind the Right2Link campaign.

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BBC growth a “threat” to democracy says top Tory

0 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , October 3rd, 2009 @ 4:43 pm

Jeremy Hunt, the UK’s shadow  culture secretary (that means that if the Conservative Party win the election next year he will likely be Culture Minister), has said the BBC‘s growth represents a threat to democracy and must be reined in with curbs to its websites, executive pay and commercial activities.

In an interview with The Guardian published today, Hunt said if the BBC failed to act on a voluntary basis he would use his role in the licence fee renewal process to push for action.

While the BBC is funded by British television licence fees, unlike state broadcasters in other countries, it is editorially independent. However, as local and regional newspapers have folded in recent months the BBC has come under increasing scrutiny.

I admire the BBC immensely. It is a national treasure and something the British people deeply cherish. It’s a tough call. No matter how good the BBC services are — and these are delivered without the commercial pressures other organisations face — it is a  state-owned corporation. If private services fail, people will be increasingly pushed to the BBC for their news. This is not healthy for democracy. But, BBC bashing has also become something of a popular sport in recent years, especially by competing media groups seeking to gain the upper hand, or politicians looking to provoke public anger over supposed profligacy within the BBC with taxpayers’ money.

I can’t but help feel, Hunt may well be playing to the gallery with an eye on the election. But while the sincerity of politicians in the UK is often called into question, his words will be welcomed by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, which has called for the BBC to be curbed in order to give struggling publishers a better commercial chance.

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