How much do we want to read online? Is the screen really the domain of the breaking-news headline, while paper is better suited to in-depth reports?

Apparently not, according to techdirt.com, who refer to the case of online magazine Slate, where writers were given the opportunity to research and produce lengthy pieces of journalism, with their work receiving millions of page views.

No content farm is going to create the type of content described above. They won’t even come close. Perhaps one of the problems with traditional media is that they’ve focused on writing stories that can be easily copied by content farms. Instead, they should be focusing on deeper, quality work.

This is also the thinking over at The Times, who believe such journalism can not only thrive online, but should be paid for.

See the full post here…

• E&P: What does it take to make $100,000 a year writing for a content farm?
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Google developing micropayment system in pitch to newspapers
• Sydney Morning Herald: Financial and sports news readers will pay online, says survey
• AdAge: Demand Media to supply original content to USA Today
• David Mitchell breaks ranks to question Guardian paywall stance

FT.com reports on the latest developments at Reader’s Digest, whose US arm recently sought bankruptcy protection.

The publication is looking to overhaul its global online activities:

“‘We were the Google News of the 1920s. We were the original aggregator,’ said Jonathan Hills, the newly promoted general manager of readersdigest.com.

(…)

“Reader’s Digest is not looking to charge for content online, he said. The new design will instead rely on a business model combining higher-quality advertising units and sales of books, CDs and other products.”

Full story at this link…

• Rob Grimshaw on the paywall backlash
• Reader’s Digest UK to file for administration
• Media Release: Reader’s Digest emerges from bankruptcy in US
• Media Business: New bidder in talks to buy RBI’s US magazines
• DNA09: If advertisers ruled the world

#FollowJourn: Christian Dunn

Who? Digital news editor, NWN Media

What? Manages the online content for a regional newspaper group publishing in north-east Wales and Chester

Where? @christiandunn and http://christiandunn.blogspot.com/

Contact? christian.dunn@nwn.co.uk

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura [at] journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

• #followjourn: @christiandunn – Christian Dunn/freelance
• #followjourn: @chriscondron/head of digital strategy
• #FollowJourn: @iainmhepburn/digital editor
• #FollowJourn: @MSNMoneyJames/editor
• #FollowJourn: @andyoakes/publisher

Courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider’s ‘Business Insider’, a chart showing that 24 per cent of US newspapers do not use any digital delivery platforms to spread their online content.

“The American Press Institute asked 2,400 newspaper executives if their papers ‘provide access to stories or information such as sports scores, headlines, stock quotes, etc.,’ via Twitter, Facebook, Email alerts, Mobile/PDA, YouTube, Kindle, Flickr, e-readers, etc., and told them to ‘check all that apply.’”

24 per cent of all respondents answered ‘None at this time’.

Business Insider post at this link…

• Is Facebook falling out of favour?
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk
• The truth about funding investigative journalism 2.0
• Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – track Twitter with Tweetbeep
• #bbcsms: Storify summary of the BBC Social Media Summit

James Murdoch’s speech at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival on Friday, titled ‘The Absence of Trust,’ concluded that ‘the only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit’. The News Corp (Europe and Asia) chairman and chief executive’s proclamation that the scale and scope of the BBC’s activities and ambitions are ‘chilling’ caused the most comment among the media critics, not least from the BBC’s Robert Peston…

For related content see:

• Emily Bell, MediaGuardian: ‘The BBC is not the problem – it’s an inability to let go of the past’

“The BBC’s significant and sprawling web presence in the UK does indeed soak up potential news audience time rather than advertising, but it is highly dubious whether it is in itself the largest obstacle to charging for online content.”

• MediaGuardian: ‘BBC’s Robert Peston in furious face-to-face row with James Murdoch’

“The BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, was involved in an astonishing slanging match with James Murdoch following the News Corporation chief’s speech to television executives in Edinburgh where he accused the BBC of mounting a ‘land grab’.”

• Peston’s Picks: Richard Dunn Memorial Lecture, given at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival by Robert Peston, on Saturday 29 August 2009: What future for media and journalism?, updated in light of Murdoch’s comments.

“Now I wrote all this before hearing James Murdoch’s passionate call in his MacTaggart Lecture for the dismantling of the BBC and the near total liberalisation of the media. But if there is a thread running through my lecture, it is this. Market-based democracies like ours need two kinds of essential infrastructure: robust financial systems that transmit cash and allocate capital where it will be most useful; and competing independent news groups that distribute impartial information so that people can take control of their lives and rein in the over-mighty.”

• FT.com: ‘Murdoch divides media and provokes Peston‘

“James Murdoch’s swingeing attack on the BBC divided senior industry executives at the Edinburgh television festival yesterday.”

• George Eaton, the New Statesman: ‘A Cameron-Murdoch alliance could devastate the BBC’

“[T]his year with a Tory Party increasingly sceptical of the BBC’s scope and scale on the brink of power, the corporation faces the threat of a powerful alliance between Cameron’s Conservatives and Murdoch’s News Corporation.”

Full speech text below:

2009 Edinburgh International Television Festival
MacTaggart Lecture
James Murdoch
28 August 2009

THE ABSENCE OF TRUST

Good evening and thank you for having me here tonight. Thanks also to Tim for those kind words of welcome.

I think this is the first time that someone who has delivered the alternative MacTaggart has graduated – if that’s the right word – to the real thing.

So I am both proud and honoured to be paving the way for Ant and Dec, who should be standing here tonight in 2018 if this trend continues.

Of course I’m flattered to be asked, but I am also a little worried. Does this finally mark my invitation to join the British broadcasting establishment?

While that thought does terrify me, I am comforted in the knowledge that after my remarks my membership will have been a brief one…

And it also occurred to me that I qualified for the invitation only after I gave up my executive role at Sky. I now spend most of my time engaged in other parts of the world and other parts of the media industry. Perhaps that means I am regarded as being safely at a bit of a distance.

But I do welcome the opportunity to talk to you all about the media in the UK – and a slight distancing might help.

You can be the judges of that.

When we gather as an industry, it’s natural for us to talk about the future. I’d like to do something different tonight: to turn our focus firmly to the present. Because the path we are already on is a dangerous one.

In particular, what I want to discuss is our digital present that is right here – it has been here for a while, in fact. A digital present that ought to compel us to make some urgent choices about where we want to go as an industry and as a society: choices which, I will argue tonight, we are currently either avoiding or mishandling.

It’s easy to lose sight of how digital we already are.

The inescapable thing about the present is that everything in it is already digital. Even if part of the consumption of media remains in the analogue world – opening a newspaper or a book, going to see a film in a cinema – the production of those creative works is already wholly digital, and the proportion that is consumed by digital means is growing all the time.

So talking about a coming digital future, or a digital transformation, is to ignore the evidence that it has already happened.

Why do I think we are getting this wrong? Why do I believe we need to change direction as a matter of urgency? It’s quite simple.

Because we have analogue attitudes in a digital age.

We have business models and a policy framework based on spectrum scarcity.

We have limited choice, and we have central planning.

The result is lost opportunities for enterprise, free choice and commercial investment.

If we recognise that truth and change in the right way, the opportunities and benefits for all of us and – more importantly – for consumers and society are powerful and attractive.

We know we have to change: the digital present is forcing us to make urgent choices.

First, the velocity of the transformation of our industry has radically increased. You know this and I don’t need to dwell on it.

Second, in this rapidly changing world the boundaries between media have broken down.

People consume content in a very fluid way, and that is reflected in the way we provide it. What were once separate forms of communication, or separate media, are now increasingly interconnected and exchangeable. So we no longer have a TV market, a newspaper market, a publishing market. We have, indisputably, an all-media market.

Third, the boundaries of what we mean by media are themselves expanding. In Japan, you can now buy your granny a mobile phone called a ‘raku raku’ – which means ‘easy easy’ – designed specifically for the elderly. It has a built-in pedometer to track how many steps she is taking each day. And you can set that so that it sends a daily e-mail to your inbox, letting you know your granny is still up and about and getting the right amount of exercise. There might be an advertisement attached. Is that media? Or health-care provision? Or is it both?

This all sounds like a dynamic, exciting, thriving sector to be part of. Moving faster, being more interconnected, expanding its scope. And in some ways it is.

But the present is not as great as we tell ourselves.

You don’t need to scratch the surface very hard to see that opportunities for media businesses are limited, investment and innovation are constrained, and creativity is reduced.

This is bad for customers and society.

This year is the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

It argued that the most dramatic evolutionary changes can occur through an  entirely natural process. Darwin proved that evolution is unmanaged.

These views were an enormous challenge to Victorian religious orthodoxy.
They remain a provocation to many people today. The number who reject Darwin and cling to the concept of creationism is substantial. And it crops up in some surprising places.

For example, right here in the broadcasting sector in the UK.

The consensus appears to be that creationism – the belief in a managed process with an omniscient authority – is the only way to achieve successful outcomes. There is general agreement that the natural operation of the market is inadequate, and that a better outcome can be achieved through the wisdom and activity of governments and regulators.

This creationist approach is similar to the industrial planning which went out of fashion in other sectors in the 1970s. It failed then. It’s failing now.

When I say this I feel like a crazy relative who everyone is a little embarrassed by and for sure is not to be taken too seriously. But tonight you have invited me to join the party and I am going to have a crack at persuading you that we can’t go on like this.

Tonight I will argue that while creationism may provide a comfortable illusion of certainty in the short-term, its harmful effects are real and they are significant.

Creationism penalises the poorest in our society with regressive taxes and policies – like the licence fee and digital switchover; It promotes inefficient infrastructure in the shape of digital terrestrial television; It creates unaccountable institutions – like the BBC Trust, Channel 4 and Ofcom; And now, in the all-media marketplace,it threatens significant damage to important spheres of human enterprise and endeavour – the provision of  independent news, investment in professional journalism, and the innovation and growth of the creative industries.

We are on the wrong path – but we can find the right one.

The right path is all about trusting and empowering consumers. It is about embracing private enterprise and profit as a driver of investment, innovation and independence. And the dramatic reduction of the activities of the state in our sector.

If we do take that better way, then we – all of us in this room and in our wider industry – will make a genuine contribution to a better-informed society; one in which trust in people and their freedom to choose is central to the way we behave.

Often the unique position that the business of ideas enjoys in a free society is used as a justification for greater intrusion and control. On the contrary, its very specialness demands an unusual and vigorous… stillness.

Let’s explore the role of creationism in our sector by asking a few basic
questions.

First question. How do the authorities currently approach intervening in and regulating the media industries?

With relish, is the answer.

In the past five years Ofcom launched nearly 450 consultations – nearly two every week. It has produced three Public Service Broadcasting annual reports, and two Public Service Broadcasting reviews in five phases. These alone have in total – including appendices, special reports and other related material – amounted to over five thousand pages and spawned another 18,000 pages of responses. And those reports have been only a small proportion of the total activity by the regulator. For any of you who missed  them this has included science fiction – a report on ‘Entertainment in the UK in 2028′, and the no doubt vital guide on ‘How to Download’, which teenagers across the land could barely have survived without.

Second question. Is it rational for the authorities to try to manage the media industry in this way? Not at all.

The study of evolution reminds us that it is very difficult to predict the outcomes of events. Interventions can have unforeseen consequences, even when dealing with organisations or marketplaces which seem very easy to understand.

Witness the international banana market. In the 1950s the banana export industry faced a problem: the then dominant Gros Michel – or ‘Big Mike’ – variety was being wiped out by a fungus called Panama Disease. The industry took the decision to replace the entire world export crop with a supposedly disease-resistant variety called the Cavendish banana – the one  we eat today. Unfortunately it now appears that these bananas may themselves be vulnerable to a different kind of Panama Disease. Since Cavendish bananas are genetically identical sterile clones, they cannot build up any resistance.

There are important lessons here: attempts to manage natural diversity have unpredictable consequences and are more likely than not to fail over the long-term.

Talking of bananas brings me neatly to our own authorities and their interventions in the all-media marketplace. Some of these looked, even without the benefit of hindsight, pretty difficult to justify at the time.

To use an example I am familiar with, take the decision of the European Commission to require the broadcasting rights to Premier League football to be divided up so that no one company could buy all the rights. The consequences of that move were predictable enough: customers having to pay more for the same thing because they’d need two subscriptions. However, in defiance of common sense, the Commission apparently believed that prices would instead fall.

Here, the repeated assertion by Ofcom of its bias against intervention is becoming impossible to believe in the face of so much evidence of the exact opposite.

A radical reorientation of the regulatory approach is necessary if dynamism and innovation is going to be central to the UK media industry.

The discipline required is to contemplate intervention only on the evidence of actual and serious harm to the interests of consumers: not merely because a regulator armed with a set of prejudices and a spreadsheet believes that a bit of tinkering here and there could make the world a better place.

Third question. What do the results of these interventions actually look like? Let’s judge by results.

According to the authorities – and I paraphrase – we should have a diverse broadcasting ecology with many PSB providers; a BBC that is not too dominant; growing investment in content of high quality; and high levels of UK production.

Now I invite you to take a look around you. Decades of ever-increasing planning and intervention have produced very different outcomes.

The BBC is dominant. Other organisations might rise and fall but the BBC’s income is guaranteed and growing.

In stark contrast, the other terrestrial networks are struggling.

Channel 4 has cut its programme budget by 10%, Five by 25%. Spending on original British children’s programming has fallen by nearly 40% since 2004, including, inexplicably, a 21% fall at the BBC at a time when the Corporation has been able to spend £100m a year out-bidding commercial channels for US programming – a figure which has increased by a quarter in the past two years.

The problems of the terrestrial broadcasters are not about the economic downturn, although it has thrown the issue into sharp relief.

It is not a coincidence that Google has a higher percentage of advertising spending in the UK than anywhere else in the world: it is a consequence of a tightly restricted commercial television sector.

That money will not come back. It is not that ad-funded television is dead: it is just a permanently smaller fish in a bigger pond.

Fourth question. Is this creationism good for investment? No. A heavily regulated environment with a large public sector crowds out the opportunity for profit, hinders the creation of new jobs, and dampens innovation in our sector.

We don’t even have the basics in place to protect creative work. Whether it’s shoplifting at HMV or pirating the same movie online, theft is theft. They are both crimes and should be treated accordingly. The government dithers – dimly aware of what it has to do but afraid to do it.

The investment climate in media in the UK reminds me of Tolstoy’s dictum that all happy families resemble one another, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. True, none of the markets I have experience of is completely happy, but there are things to welcome – the regulatory professionalism of Germany, the growth opportunities of India – even France outdoes us in its robust defence of intellectual property. The problem with the
UK is that it is unhappy in every way: it’s the Addams family of world media.

If such determined efforts to manage the marketplace are failing, it might be useful to look at alternative approaches.

One such approach might be to trust people.

Consider Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman – who discovered that reducing the amount of signs and traffic markings in towns and villages does not make roads more dangerous, as you might imagine. On the contrary, people drive more safely and there are fewer accidents. As Monderman said: “If you treat drivers like idiots, they act as idiots. Never treat anyone in the
public realm as an idiot, always assume they have intelligence.”

In contrast, the authorities in the UK and their clients: those dependent agencies, entities and enterprises, which one way or the other have been made to rely on the largesse of the state – have refused to trust the people who matter – the people who pay the bills as customers and as tax-payers.

Indeed, the defining characteristic of the UK broadcasting consensus is the absence of trust.

Yet there is an example right on our doorstep of the positive developments that come about when we encourage a world of trust and free choice.

Within the next few months, the number of homes in the UK that enjoy some form of television that they freely choose to pay for will top fifty percent. This steady growth of choice-driven television has nothing to do with public policy.

In fact, the authorities have consistently favoured so called free-to-air broadcasting. Yet, as you might expect, people who are used to paying for films, books, internet access and other quality content, do not see anything strange in paying for quality television too.

When pay-television began in this country, it did so largely by providing programmes in genres which public service broadcasting served inadequately: such as 24-hour news, and a broad choice of sport and the latest films.

As originally with news and sport, so now with the arts and drama. Sky now offers four dedicated arts channels. Original commissioning by channels that customers choose to pay for is expanding and will continue to do so, not just from Sky but from the likes of National Geographic, History, MTV and the Disney Channel, to name a few. Sky alone now invests over £1 billion a year in UK content.

And it is this sector which has delivered so many innovations: from multichannel television in the first place, to the launch of digital, personal video recorders, high definition and soon 3D TV in the home.

All this – despite the dampening effect of a massive state-funded intervention which reduces the scope for programme investment and commissioning from independent production companies by private broadcasters. That is a major missed opportunity for the creative industries. And yet the authorities in the UK continue to seek more control and greater intervention.

There are many examples. First, the amount of detailed content regulation in UK broadcasting is astonishing.

Two or three times a month, Ofcom publishes a Broadcasting Bulletin – a recent version weighed in at 119 pages. Adjudications included judgments on whether it is fair to describe Middlesbrough as the worst place to live in the UK; and 20 pages on whether a BBC documentary on climate change was fair to two of the participants. Every year, roughly half-a-million words are being devoted to telling broadcasters what they can and cannot say.

Next, the UK and EU regulatory system also tightly controls advertising: the amount of advertising per hour, the availability of product placement, the distinction between advertising and editorial and so forth.

These rules often seem to have little connection with protecting people from real harm. As an example, Star Plus – one of News Corp’s Hindi language entertainment channels – has been unable to show in the UK the Indian version of ‘Are you smarter than a ten-year old?’ because the logo of an Indian mobile phone company, which does not even operate in this country, appears on the set. What exactly are they afraid of?

Excessive regulation can also have more serious consequences. The latest EU-inspired rules on scheduling of advertising restrict the number of ad breaks permitted in news programming. Television news is already a tough enough business. If implemented, these proposals could undermine the commercial viability of news broadcasting even further.

In addition, the system is concerned with imposing what it calls impartiality in broadcast news. It should hardly be necessary to point out that the mere selection of stories and their place in the running order is itself a process full of unacknowledged partiality.

The effect of the system is not to curb bias – bias is present in all news media – but simply to disguise it.

We should be honest about this: it is an impingement on freedom of speech and on the right of people to choose what kind of news to watch. How in an all-media marketplace can we justify this degree of control in one place and not in others?

Content control, advertising regulation and restrictions on freedom of speech. We have been brought up in this system. It probably seems as natural and inevitable as rainfall. But is it really necessary? Is there no alternative?

Other areas of the media have been able to get by without it. There is a strong alternative tradition with at least four centuries behind it – first of pamphlets and books, later of magazines and newspapers. From the broadsides of the Levellers, to the thundering 19th century Times, to The Sun fighting for the rights of veterans today – it is a tradition of free comment, of investigative reporting, of satirizing and exposing the behaviour of one’s betters.

Yes, the free press is fairly near the knuckle on occasion – it is noisy, disrespectful, raucous and quite capable of affronting people – it is frequently the despair of judges and it gets up the noses of politicians on a regular basis. But it is driven by the daily demand and choices of millions of people. It has had the profits to enable it to be fearless and independent. Great journalism does not get enough credit in our society, but it holds the powerful to account and plays a vital part in a functioning democracy.

Would we welcome a world in which The Times was told by the government how much religious coverage it had to carry?

In which there were a state newspaper with more money than the rest of the sector put together and 50% of the market?

In which cinemas were instructed how many ads they were allowed to put before the main feature?

In which Bloomsbury had to publish an equal number of pro-capitalist and pro- socialist books?

And, of course, we had to pay for an Ofpress to make sure all these rules were observed?

No, of course we would not. So why do we continue to assume that this approach is appropriate for broadcasting: especially as one communications medium is now barely distinguishable from another?

There is a word for this.

It’s not one that the system likes to hear, but let’s be honest: the right word is authoritarianism and it has always been part of our system.

It is hardly a secret that the early years of British broadcasting were dominated by concern about the potential of the new technology for creating social disruption. To deal with that perceived threat, there were two responses: to nationalise broadcasting through the BBC, and to ensure that any other provider was closely controlled and appropriately incentivised.

The greatest divergence between the rest of the media and broadcasting is the unspoken approach to the customer. In the regulated world of Public Service Broadcasting the customer does not exist: he or she is a passive creature – a viewer – in need of protection. In other parts of the media world – including pay television and newspapers – the customer is just that: someone whose very freedom to choose makes them important. And because they have power they are treated with great seriousness and respect, as people who are perfectly capable of making informed judgements about what to buy, read, and go and see.

The all-media world offers great opportunities for our society. We could take the approach of trust and freedom and apply it through the whole of the media, broadcasting included. But we are doing the opposite. We are using the interconnectedness of the media as a way of opening the door to the expansion of control.

This is already happening. There is a land-grab, pure and simple, going on – and in the interests of a free society it should be sternly resisted.

The land grab is spear-headed by the BBC. The scale and scope of its current activities and future ambitions is chilling.

Being funded by a universal hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered and obliged to try and offer something for everyone, even in areas well served by the market.

This whole approach is based on a mistaken view of the rationale behind state intervention and it produces bizarre and perverse outcomes. Rather than concentrating on areas where the market is not delivering, the BBC seeks to compete head-on for audiences with commercial providers to try and shore up support – or more accurately dampen opposition – to a compulsory licence fee.

Take Radio 2 as an example. A few years back, the BBC observed that it was losing share of listening among the 25-45 age-group, who were well served by commercial stations. Instead of stepping back and allowing the market to do its job, the BBC decided to reposition Radio 2 to go after this same group. Performers like Jonathan Ross were recruited on salaries no commercial competitor could afford, and audiences for Radio 2 have grown steadily as a result.

No doubt the BBC celebrates the fact that it now has well over half of all radio listening. But the consequent impoverishment of the once-successful commercial sector is testament to the Corporation’s inability to distinguish between what is good for it, and what is good for the country.

Of course, this problem is compounded by the fact that there is no real oversight of this £4.6 billion intervention in the market, as the abysmal record of the BBC Trust demonstrates. So the breadth of intervention is striking and it is continuing to expand unchecked.

The negative consequences of this expansion for innovation and development in the creative industries are serious.

The nationalisation of the Lonely Planet travel guide business was a particularly egregious example of the expansion of the state into providing magazines and websites on a commercial basis. It stood out for its overt recklessness and for the total failure of the BBC Trust to ask tough questions about what management was up to.

Others in other sectors can tell similar stories: and they observe that if the BBC suffers any setback in expansion, it is merely temporary: there will soon be another initiative requiring yet more management time to fight off.

As new entrants like Joost discovered, operating alongside the BBC, without access to its content or cross-promotional power, is not a task for the faint hearted. You need deep pockets, sheer bloody-mindedness and an army of lawyers just to make the BBC Trust sit up and pay attention.

Most importantly, in this all-media marketplace, the expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision, which are so important for our democracy.

Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly
difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet.

Yet it is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it.

We seem to have decided as a society to let independence and plurality wither. To let the BBC throttle the news market and then get bigger to compensate.

Most policy-making is however pre-occupied with the supposed malign intervention of capitalists focused on profit, and is blind to the growth of the state.

Nearly all local authorities already publish their own newspapers with flattering accounts of their doings. Over 60% of these pocket-Pravdas carry advertising, weakening the local presence of more critical voices. I saw recently an article in which the editor of the Guardian suggested that the government should fund local news coverage of court proceedings and council meetings, a profoundly undemocratic and ruinous idea.

Just ask yourself whether Camilla Cavendish’s award-winning campaign to open up the family courts would have occurred in a state-funded newspaper? The investigation would never have been allowed to take place.

For hundreds of years people have fought for the right to publish what they think.

Yet today the threat to independent news provision is serious and imminent.

More broadly, it must serve as a warning of what happens when state intervention and regulatory micro-management are allowed to go unchecked in the all-media marketplace. For the future health of our industry and our society, we must not allow these creationist tendencies to go on limiting the opportunities for independent commercial businesses, whether in journalism or any other form of content.

The private sector is a source of investment, talent, creativity and innovation in UK media.

But it will never fulfil its full potential unless we adopt a policy framework that recognises the centrality of commercial incentives.

This means accepting the simple truth that the ability to generate a profitable return is fundamental to the continuation of the quality, plurality and independence that we value so highly.

For that to happen our politicians and regulators need to have the courage to leave behind their analogue attitudes and choose a path for the digital present. So far, they have shown little inclination to do so.

Thanks to Darwin we understand that the evolution of a successful species is an unmanaged process. I have tried to show tonight that interventionist management of what is sometimes called the broadcasting ecology is not helping it – it is exhausting it.

Broadcasting is now part of a single all-media market. It brings two very different stories to that bigger market. On the one hand authoritarianism: endless intervention, regulation and control. On the other, the free part of the market where success has been achieved by a determined resistance to the constant efforts of the authorities to interfere.

I have argued tonight that this success is based on a very simple principle: trust people.

People are very good at making choices: choices about what media to consume; whether to pay for it and how much; what they think is acceptable to watch, read and hear; and the result of their billions of choices is that good companies survive, prosper, and proliferate.

That is a great story and it has been powerfully positive for our society.

But we are not learning from that. Governments and regulators are wonderfully crafted machines for mission creep. For them, the abolition of media boundaries is a trumpet call to expansion: to do more, regulate more, control more.

Sixty years ago George Orwell published 1984. Its message is more relevant now than ever.

As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to
guarantee manipulation and distortion.

We must have a plurality of voices and they must be independent. Yet we have a system in which state-sponsored media – the BBC in particular – grow ever more dominant.

That process has to be reversed.

If we are to have that state sponsorship at all, then it is fundamental to the health of the creative industries, independent production, and professional journalism that it exists on a far, far smaller scale.

Above all we must have genuine independence in news media. Genuine independence is a rare thing. No amount of governance in the form of committees, regulators, trusts or advisory bodies is truly sufficient as a guarantor of independence. In fact, they curb speech.

On the contrary, independence is characterised by the absence of the apparatus of supervision and dependency.

Independence of faction, industrial or political.

Independence of subsidy, gift and patronage.

Independence is sustained by true accountability – the accountability owed to customers. People who buy the newspapers, open the application, decide to take out the television subscription – people who deliberately and willingly choose a service which they value.

And people value honest, fearless, and above all independent news coverage that challenges the consensus.

There is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society.

The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.

• BBC Trust’s dilemma over local video plans
• BBC Trust responds to MPs’ accusations over commercial expansion
• BBC’s plan for mobile news apps heavily criticised
• BBC Trust launches ‘its largest’ TV service review – into BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four
• Cameron calls for restraints on BBC’s commercial operations, supports local media

The Editors Weblog picks up reports from Press News and 20minutes that the French daily, Le Figaro, is to start charging for some of its online content in early 2010.

Full post at this link…

• Editors Weblog: The launch of Slate.fr in beta
• Le Figaro’s new online payment plans
• Editors Weblog: Figaro group’s new financial news subscription service
• SFN Blog: French news sites to erect pay walls
• Editors Weblog: French government considering ‘Google tax’

More from Lionel Barber on the future as paid-for, following his speech at an industry event last month in which the FT editor predicted almost all news organisations would charge for online content in the next 12 months.

In an interview with Channel 4 News’ Benjamin Cohen, Barber explains how the FT’s part-free/part-subscription model could be replicated by other news organsiations; and gives his views on the BBC’s recent video plans.

“I think there is an inexorable momentum behind charging for content (…) What I would say to the competition and to the rest of the world is that it’s getting late. If we move now we can assure ourselves of a prosperous future.”

• Paywall and subscription models: a study of 30+ organisations
• paidContent:UK: FT confirms new additions to subscription model
• ‘We don’t see this as a paywall’, says Express and Star
• WSJ.com to open up some premium content
• Sydney Morning Herald: The Australian to reveal paywall details this week

A couple of things extremely pertinent to the paid content debate in a ‘view from the top’ interview on FT.com.

It’s with Liberty Media chairman, John Malone, described by the FT’s Richard Milne as ‘one of the most powerful figures in the media world’. He controls a ‘sprawling empire of assets’ including  DirecTV, the Discovery Channel, QVC, the Atlanta Braves baseball team and a company focused on Cable TV, Liberty Global.

Two extracts from the interview:

“How bad is the outlook for the media industry right now?”

“The media has lots of different elements in it. Probably at the bottom would be local, because local advertising has been the most adversely affected. Newsprint is probably the most damaged media going forward. Cable television has been OK. It continues to grow, a little slower than we’d like. The broadcast networks are getting beaten up, but not as bad on their national side as on their local side (…)”

and:

“A big debate in media is: can you get consumers to pay for online content?

“There will be a transition to people paying for [the] internet. Unfortunately, a lot of the people promoting the internet have other monetisation theories, such as search, which is ‘free’ to the consumer. Believe me, it’s not free to the retailer. The real question is: can you get people to pay for content on the internet? That will happen over time. If you’re a newspaper publisher and you’re giving information free on the internet and charging a subscription fee [for the paper], I don’t understand the logic.”

Full interview at this link…

And this:

“Long or short? Newspapers? Short James Murdoch? Long Hedge fund regulation? Long Share prices? Neutral The European economy? Short Nicolas Sarkozy? Long Ben Bernanke? Long Barack Obama’s healthcare plan? Disaster – short Twitter? Neutral Barry Diller? Long.”

• Rob Grimshaw on the paywall backlash
• Mashable: Why CNN has acquired iPad magazine Zite
• ‘We don’t see this as a paywall’, says Express and Star
• Salford Star: Council newspaper costing £27,797 a month – what impact on local news?
• Charlie Beckett: Do we have an information overload?

This goes back to last week, but it seems worth putting up here anyway. Last Thursday Matt Wardman covered this story for Press Gazette: about the Newspaper Licensing Agency regulating hyperlinks for commercial agencies and aggregators.

“The NLA will be introducing a new form of licence from 1 September to regulate ‘web aggregator’ services (such as Meltwater) that forward links to newspaper websites and for press cuttings agencies undertaking this type of activity.”

Craig McGill also picked up on it and asked a series of provocative questions. He got a lengthy response from the NLA, including this:

“This is not about bloggers adding links to newspaper sites. Our focus is on professional media monitoring organisations (news aggregators, press cuttings agencies) and their client business who make extensive use of the newspaper content.”

More questions are raised in the comments beneath McGill’s piece, including this one about copyright law.

Last Friday Journalism.co.uk spoke to the NLA who said it was part of their new e-Clips service – ‘a feed of newspapers’ online content direct to cuttings aggregators and press cuttings agencies.’

Here’s the NLA statement in full:

“The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) today [dated June 2009] announced a new business-to- business clippings database for newspaper websites to launch in January 2010. It also has said it will extend its licensing remit to cover newspaper websites from January 2010.

“The new service, called eClips web, will offer a complete feed of newspapers’ online content direct  to cuttings aggregators and press cuttings agencies. Powered directly from newspapers’ own content-management systems, eClips web will make web-based media monitoring faster and richer and provide a permanent record for PR and communications professionals.

“The NLA will also extend its licensing remit to cover local and national newspapers’ web content. David Pugh, managing director of the NLA, said: “We have two aims: to contribute to the growth of web monitoring; and to protect the rights of publishers. Research shows that 23 per cent of newspapers’ online content never appears in print and that the internet is growing in influence as a resource for news. So it is vital to have comprehensive monitoring coverage of newspapers’ websites – and vital that the publishers are properly rewarded for their work.”

“From September 2009, web aggregators that charge clients for their services will require a NLA licence and be charged from January 2010, The press cuttings agencies that either ‘scrape’ content themselves or buy in services from aggregators will also be licensed and charged. Client companies that receive and forward links from these commercial aggregators within their organisation will also require a licence.

“David Pugh added: “We have consulted extensively across the industry – the incremental charges for web cuttings will be low and manageable. I stress this is not about individuals sharing links – we think that’s great for newspapers and promotes their websites and their readership.  What we are doing is making sure that newspapers are rewarded fairly for professional use of their web content by businesses.”"

Further notes:

“The NLA is owned by the 8 national newspaper publishing houses and generates B2B revenues for
1,300 national and regional publishers through licensing use of their content by press cuttings
agencies (PCAs) and their client companies.

“The new licences will cover all local and national titles with the exception of the Financial Times and
the News International titles. These will all, however, be included in the eClips web database.”

• Craig McGill: NLA charging for backlinks – a response
• NLA suspends payment of new link charges for aggregators
• NewsNow re-enters newspaper linking fight with campaign; Meltwater takes NLA to copyright tribunal
• Update: Newspaper Licensing Agency hits back at claim it is ‘taxing the internet’
• News International steps up blocking of aggregators

“Shhhh. Newspaper Publishers Are Quietly Holding a Very, Very Important Conclave Today. Will You Soon Be Paying for Online Content?” revealed James Warren, yesterday.

Full story at this link…

• Econsultancy: The biggest problem for journalism? The product
• AOP: Mirror digital director Matt Kelly and the 800lb gorilla in the room
• Advertising Age: Why ad networks are surviving
• Crikey.com.au: ‘Who reads a newspaper website the way they used to read a paper?’
• #FollowJourn: @MarcusWa/online editor

I’ve provided a guest post for BeatBlogging.org, the US-based site that looks at how to use social networks and other web tools to improve beat reporting. Using examples from various Journalism.co.uk pieces, I argue that it is very difficult to look towards coverged newsroom, under the hybrid regulatory systems with which we operate as UK-based publishers. Thoughts welcomed.

Read it in full over at the site. Here’s an extract:

We talk about converging newsrooms of the future that transcend boundaries between online, print and broadcast, but at a very fundamental level that process is impossible in the United Kingdom.

Martin Belam, information architect for the Guardian, recently emphasized that point in an interview with Journalism.co.uk:

“In a converged media landscape, it seems odd that [BBC's] Robert Peston’s blog is regulated by the BBC Trust, [Channel 4's] Jon Snow’s blog is regulated by Ofcom, and [the Guardian's] Roy Greenslade’s blog is regulated by the PCC.”

Now, Martin was actually wrong on the Jon Snow point: Ofcom does not regulate any television Web sites at all. That is to say, the brands which must adhere to a strict code for television content are completely unregulated online. Ofcom advises consumers to make complaints about online content to their Internet service provider.

The BBC Trust regulates the BBC online; the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) regulates newspapers, magazines and their online content.

And Stephen Fry, who – at the time of writing — is nearing half a million followers on Twitter? Or Guido Fawkes (aka Paul Staines) who has a loyal readership to rival most newspaper commentators? Well, they govern themselves – unless the law gets involved.

When the traditional media sectors go online, they’re regulated by their various bodies, and the ‘online-onlys’ only have the courts to worry about. Press publications have a less strict code than broadcasters, but online, broadcasters have more freedom than the press – though they don’t seem to be exercising it.

In a nutshell, a financial commentator from a newspaper has greater freedom than a financial commentator from a broadcaster, and an independent online-only financial commentator has the greatest freedom of all.

What happens when a bank crashes? Channel 4 and ITV can theoretically report how they like – online. The BBC must always answer to the BBC Trust. The newspapers must comply with the PCC code. Martin Lewis, of the MoneySaving Expert can, if he so chooses, be a law unto himself.

Same news and it’s all online but in very different guises. We might think people know the difference, but do they?

Full post at this link…

• Ofcom: Galloway’s Press TV programmes in breach of code
• Ofcom: where does it stand on internet regulation?
• Cameron calls for restraints on BBC’s commercial operations, supports local media
• Press Complaints Commission: Sunday Times columnist breached Editors’ Code
• Jon Gaunt wins permission for high court challenge

A new survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers has suggested that readers interested in finance and sport showed a ‘relatively high willingness’ to pay for this type of content online.

“But overall, consumers were not prepared to pay as much for online content as for a traditional paper, and ‘would choose free content when the quality was comparable or sufficient for their purpose’,” says the Herald’s report.

Full story at this link…

• The Australian: Australian journalism may need government support in wake of Fairfax cuts, says veteran
• Pay walls for news will produce ‘more corpses than successes’, says report
• FT.com: Online consumers will accept ads for free content, says survey
• The Media Business: Consumers see the true picture when ads disappear
• Knight Center: What the Waco Tribune-Herald has learned from its premium content model

Robert Andrews gives a rundown of the problems newspaper companies face when trying to ‘get the genie back in the bottle’ – charging for online content that has been free for 15 years. Also be aware of gorillas and white elephants, he says.

Full post at this link…

• paidContent:UK: Publishers should skip thinking about e-readers
• paidContent:UK: A pay-for BBC could backfire on its rivals
• Martin Moore: #futureofnews is ‘not so bleak, but not so rosy either’
• Poynter Online: How to ‘get off the free-content treadmill’
• Thelondonpaper – what everyone’s saying

As the mainstream media shifts to writing more online content, its standards and guidelines are up for discussion. Just how much of other people’s work on external sites can/should you use and how should you attribute in articles?

Stephen Hutcheon, of the Sydney Morning Herald, flagged up an issue in a blog post on February 5. He is not happy with the way material from an interview he conducted with GoogleEarth (30/01/09) was used in an article on TimesOnline by Mike Harvey (30/01/09) – the latest version of which is at this link.

Hutcheon’s account can be read at this link with a screen grab of the Times’ original article.

The original Times piece shows the Sydney Morning Herald was named in the third paragraph, and, later in the piece, it again specified ‘Mr Hanke told the newspaper’.

Hutcheon had two complaints:

• Firstly, that Harvey had not linked to his original article.
• Secondly, the proportion of the article made up of Hutcheon’s quotes, which Hutcheon feels weren’t adequately labelled as his own work.

According to Hutcheon, Mike Harvey then contacted him with a ‘sincere apology’. “He said it was not his publication’s policy to link back to original articles but said that as a gesture of goodwill, they would do it.”

The TimesOnline article now has a link to the original SMH article, but Hutcheon remains unsatisfied:

“I told him I accepted his apology. However, he made no mention about my central complaint about the amount of material he lifted, nor does he appear to have cut out any from his piece. But that’s about as much as I can do. That, I told him, was an ethical matter between him and his editors.”

Journalism.co.uk asked Hutcheon about his own paper’s linking policy, via email. Hutcheon said:

“My issue is less with the lack of a link. We [SMH] don’t have a hard and fast policy on links. If we quote a par or so, no need to reference where it came from. But if we write a story about this amazing thing someone’s photographed or found, or written and the story is largely based on the other person’s discovery or effort, then yes. It’s a bit like writing about a YouTube video without pointing readers to it. Mike apologised but failed to cut back the almost 500 words – most of them direct quotes from my one-on-one interview with John Hanke. If traditional news organisations are prepared to let their reporters get away with this type of cheap journalism, then it’s a race to the bottom and we’re all doomed. If everyone just copies everyone else, who is left to do the original reporting?”

Journalism.co.uk contacted Tom Whitwell, assistant editor of TimesOnline to clarify the situation.

He said the Times’ linking policy was being worked on and while there ‘was no official linking policy’, journalists could link to other work at the moment.

However, he said, the subbing system and workflow in place – used for online as well as print work – meant links often got omitted. But ‘the general policy would be to link out to things’, he said.

“In terms of the principle I’m extremely firm that [we link] not as courtesy, but as service to the readers.”

In regards to the proportion of quotes used, Whitwell said:

“I think it’s fairly clear that he [Hanke] was talking to the Sydney Morning Herald (…) that particular example is reasonable.

“This isn’t something we do often as a policy. We don’t have a policy to do this regularly – I think in this particular instance it’s fairly clear to the reader what the story is.

“We do need to have a clear written policy at what point we link, and I’m in the process of putting that together. That to me, is interesting, the motivations for linking. To me, it’s purely about providing the service to readers (…) a better way of telling the story. The idea that it’s good manners, legally crediting something, isn’t the key thing for me.

“It is very different for online than print (…) I don’t want to get into the way some other newspapers operate, which is rather different from the way we operate, in terms of using material from other sites. In some sites there is real culture of picking up stories from lots and lots of places, constantly, as a matter of course. That’s not something we usually do,” Whitwell said.

The problem with linking arose in the production system, he said, which “has no way of capturing URLs, a purely manual process – I suspect this piece went through this process. We need to work out how to get the process to work.” Getting more links into place is ‘tricky’, but ‘not impossible’, he added.

Journalism.co.uk also contacted the Times piece’s author Mike Harvey, who did not respond by email.

Here’s an example where a paper did not attribute at all: a case over at Regret The Error, involving the NY Daily News, in which an accusation was made that material had been lifted from the Express-News, ‘without attribution’, for a piece on NYDailyNews.com.

A later amendment at NYDailyNews.com noted that ‘An earlier version of this story should have attributed quotes by certain individuals to reporting by the San Antonio Express-News.’

Hutcheon’s post hasn’t yet received any comments; perhaps this one is up for debate? Just how much is too much?

• Times responds to blogger’s claims of ‘cut-and-paste’ journalism
• Correction for Las Vegas Sun site over use of anonymous online comments in article
• Star News Online: Why news organisations should link to the competition
• Washington Post: ‘Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article’
• Online Journalism Scandinavia: Resolutions for 2009 – Yes, we link

The Times’ executive editor Bill Keller has suggested micro-payment systems and full-access subscriptions are being considered for online content.

The paper ended its paid-for access model, TimesSelect, in September 2007.

Full story at this link…

• OJR: New York Times ‘needs an online impresario’
• New US local paper paywall divides readership
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Google developing micropayment system in pitch to newspapers
• Media Week: Economist to introduce new pay models online
• NYTimes.com: Exec editor takes NYTimes reader questions