Tomorrow's News, Tomorrow's Journalists

We won’t pay for news (and why we shouldn’t have to)

Do you know the dumbest thing I ever heard a journalist say about paying for content?

Well, I’ll tell you.

I was at an event called something like “The future of photojournalism: what the hell are we going to do?!” last winter, hosted by Amnesty International. It was full of photojournalists scratching their heads about where their profession was heading.

One person put up their hand, having been told the future was in audio slideshows, online magazines and working with NGOs, and said “that’s all very well, but who’s going to pay us for this?”

A good question. The answer, which flew from the lips of the photo editor of a national Sunday newspaper, was the stupidest thing I ever heard:

“One day people are going to have to pay for news,” she declared, “because journalists have got to eat.”

Let’s be clear: this is utterly upside-down thinking and betrays a disturbing lack of understanding of not just how business works, but how the world works. People are not queuing down Regent Street for an iPhone4 because Steve Jobs needs to eat. They don’t use LastMinute.com to book their holidays because Martha Lane-Fox is looking a bit skinny.

We buy those products and use those services because they offer an affordable solution to a pain we have in our lives. In the case of Apple that pain is: “I need a fast, easy to use, computer with me wherever I go” or it might even be “everyone else has got one and I feel I’m missing out.”

We go to EasyJet or BMI for our flights first because they cure the pain we all face when traveling by air: it’s too expensive.

The same rules apply to our journalism. Except the solution we provide is almost always “information”, not a phone or a cheap holiday. So, the question we should be asking is: “what pain do people have that my information can cure?”. If the pain hurts bad enough, and your information is the panacea, then you’re in business.

Think of the journalist Martin Lewis: his website moneysavingexpert.com has become the go-to place for thousands of people because it cures an information pain they have: they want to know how credit works, what the best mortgage options are and even when there’s 10% off at H&M. And it’s a hugely popular website.

And that’s the answer right?

Except, annoyingly, it isn’t. You see, even applying those age-old business principles to journalism, people aren’t going to pay to read news they can read elsewhere for free. Martin Lewis doesn’t (by choice, I might add) make money from his users or ad revenue.

“Generation Y-Pay?” are hooked on the free stuff. So where does news and journalism and money fit into this?

This was the big question I set out to get people to answer when I founded the Future of News Meetup group nearly a year ago. I ran a short series of “business bootcamps” over the summer where we got together an tried to patch together a business model for specific areas of journalism: travel, development, hyperlocal, and the like. And one common theme kept emerging.

The models we kept coming up with had multiple revenue streams, including advertising, subscriptions, affiliate links, sponsorships – even an online store: none of which were connected to the journalism itself. Martin Lewis knows this: he leverages affiliate links to make his money.

But we all agreed no-one would come and shop in our store, or visit our sponsors if there wasn’t some shit-hot journalism to attract them. It led us to this symbiotic relationship between journalism and the revenue generators: the journalism won’t make any money…but you can’t make any money without the journalism.

This model fits nicely, I think, in the niche markets of the future. Combine this approach with a small, targeted audience with a craving for information about a specific area, and you’ve got a business.

In an excellent blog post this week Patrick Smith (who also came to one of the business bootcamps) highlights the idea that online news needs to learn more from internet retail and not publishing – we need to be thinking how to upsell products and build affiliates.

Would this approach work in the mainstream media? Well, they’re definitely trying it out – the Guardian makes a significant chunk of cash from its Soulmates enterprise, and the Sunday Times’ & Telegraph’s wine club’s are famously profitable.

Online dating and plonk have nothing to do with the journalism – but they sure as hell pay for it.