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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— June – July 2013
I
T may not be a huge amount, but one
would certainly notice if € a year was
thrown away on guff. The Sun has recently
announced that it will bring in a paywall of
£ per week for access to its online content, start-
ing on the st of August. With the Irish Times and
the Irish Independent now planning to introduce
(or re-introduce) online subscriptions, and
mooted as ‘the year of the paywall’, bringing in
subscriptions will not automatically save ‘quality
journalism’ – what’s behind the wall will always
be most important.
The Sun remains Britain’s biggest-selling daily
newspaper, with almost .m copies per day in
January of this year. It also remains unavailable
in many parts of Liverpool, years after its infa-
mous coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, and
it was widely criticised in many respects (though
not as robustly as some would have hoped) in the
Leveson Report.
For those unfamiliar with The Sun’s editorial
line, it is unnecessary to turn more than the first
page for an indication.
On ‘Page ’, along with a topless model, is
what is known as News in Briefs – a wheeze that
includes a verbose, and pretentiously-written,
comment on an aspect of current affairs, labelled
as a quote from the model herself. The joke, if we
can call it that, stems from the fact that The Sun
finds it hilarious that a woman valued only for her
looks might actually have a worthwhile opinion.
‘Page ’ has long been criticised as misogynist,
and was mentioned in the Leveson Report on the
culture, practices, and ethics of the British press.
Although Leveson felt it was not the place of the
Inquiry to examine such egregious sexism in the
industry, the Report did state that the impact of
discriminatory and prejudicial representations
of women would merit further consideration by
any new regulator.
In reality, the new online service, referred to
as ‘Sun+’, is founded upon the paper’s new £m
deal for exclusive rights to show highlights of
all English Premiership matches in the coming
season. This is no secret: the paywall had been
rumoured for September, before being brought
forward to cover the League’s first round on the
th of August.
So far, there is simply no consensus on
whether this approach is the right way to go for
any site. If there were, perhaps two senior edi-
tors at the German weekly Der Spiegel would not
have been sacked in April, following a row over
whether to charge subscriptions on the maga-
zine’s site. There are, nevertheless, some notable
success stories.
The New York Times is an example of what is
called a ‘soft’, or ‘porous’ paywall. Essentially, it’s
a wall with a few gaps that you can peek through.
At present, users without a subscription can read
ten articles per month on nytimes.com. After two
years of the model, online subscribers now con-
stitute almost , – impressive, although
there have been reports that numbers may now be
reaching a plateau, with growth of % in the first
quarter of the slowest since launch in .
Its success has drawn attention, however, and
many are planning their walls. The New Yorker
has, for example, been testing the water with a
public opinion survey.
The Sun, on the other hand, will be the third
and last within Rupert Murdoch’s British news-
paper empire to impose a paywall as thick as the
skin of Murdoch himself. This ‘hard’ model offers
no free samples: users must subscribe from the
first article onwards. It is a riskier strategy, and
when The Times and Sunday Times brought in the
model in , traffic to the sites fell by %, as
is expected in the industry, from approximately
m unique users per day, to less than ,
according to calculations by the Guardian. A prior
online readership of around , has only
now recovered to ,, according to the May
National Readership Survey (NRS). In the three
years of paywall exclusivity, thetimes.co.uk daily
online readership has only gradually recovered
to a recent monthly readership of ,, the
lowest of any ‘quality’ newspaper website in the
latest National Readership Survey (UK), released
media
Sun shines
behind wall
Newspaper readers will pay only if their
subscription brings them high-quality content
al mcconnell
Trafc to the London
Times’
sites fell by 90%, from
around 1m unique daily
users, to less than 100,000
“
at the end of May. For the Sun to make a success
of it, the site will need to attract , sub-
scribers, according to IHS Electronics and Media
Analysts, though some estimate it will require
even more.
Of course there are many sites that have
refused to charge readers. The Guardian online
remains free, and the Daily Mail’s free ‘Mail
Online’ is now the most widely-viewed news site
in the world, with daily unique visitors pushing
eight million in January of this year. This success,
however, has been driven by the Mail’s single-
minded approach of focusing almost entirely on
celebrity gossip and aggressive search-engine
domination. If that’s what it takes to become the
most visited ‘news’ site, then the Guardian faces
a wrestle with its famous conscience.
Speaking at a paidContent conference in
New York on the th of April, Editor-in-Chief
Alan Rusbridger said: “We’ve always said we’re
open-minded [towards online subscription] but
we’re not planning on having one”. Statistically,
it’s easy to see why. According to the latest NRS,
which looks at print and online readerships,
guardian.co.uk has over eight million monthly
readers within the UK, which has powered a
% increase in the Guardian’s overall readers
(print and online), while the equivalent statistic
for The Times languishes at only .%.
Sheer numbers no longer correlate with com-
mercial viability, necessarily. In the year to April
, Guardian News & Media (the paper’s pub-
lisher) reported pre-tax losses of almost £m,
and editorial redundancies have been as wide-
spread at the paper as at its competitors.
Stephen Rae, Editor of the Irish Independent,
has indicated that independent.ie will be erect-
ing a paywall in the near future, while irishtimes.
com is planning to introduce charges by the end
of the year, according to Managing Director Liam
Kavanagh, speaking on the RTÉ ‘Media Show’ in
April. Of course, with enthusiasm for irishtimes.
com at a seemingly disastrous low (see Frank
Schnittger in Village April-May), it might be hard
to argue that this is a moment to be seized, par-
ticularly recalling the paper’s previous experience
with paywalls. However, inaction is not an option
– between July and December , the circula-
tions of the Irish Times, the Irish Independent
and the Examiner were down by -% on the
same period in .
Online subscription can come in all shapes
and sizes. Some have argued in favour of a pack-
age approach, as has been adopted by the New
York Times, which bundles services such as print
copies, mobile and tablet apps, and site access,
in various combinations. In this model, it is pos-
sible print can stay alive even as a loss-making
aspect of the business, that keeps the ‘brand’ in
the public mind.
There are also some fundamental bumps that
have yet to be hammered out. Digital-advertising
revenues are a minuscule fraction of print-adver-
tising revenues, as the virtually unlimited supply
of advertising space online means prices are kept
down. Attracting a new generation of young read-
ers to a news ‘brand’ also conflicts with paywall
models – expecting young people to pay upwards
of € for access to a single news site is unre-
alistic. The current impasse over how to drag
journalism into the digital era is only worsening
with time, as the wide range of free news sites,
such as broadsheet.ie and the journal.ie, continue
to attract a youthful readership. Perhaps a model
that brings news to Ireland’s youth, in an engag-
ing way, will not be profit-propelled at all.
In the end, whether online subscription offers
a future for journalism will depend on what each
site has to offer. If what’s behind the wall is worth
seeing, maybe people will grasp for the door in. If
what’s behind the wall is ‘News in Briefs’, however,
make sure the windows are locked.
