Journal.
Where ‘chilling’ ambition meets cold reality
I’m intrigued by how much of the coverage of James Murdoch’s speech to the Edinburgh International Television Festival has focused on what it means for print and television rather than digital, because – regardless of the festival’s name – digital is what I think may have been his primary target.
Looking past the deliberate baiting in his speech, in deploying loaded phrases like characterising the BBC as ‘state sponsored’ and ‘chilling’ in its ambition, it’s more interesting to me to note that the scene setting context for the main part of his speech is all about digital:
‘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.’
News Corporation’s long-established plans to start charging for digital content, having given it away for years, is reliant on a desparate newspaper industry that is on its knees following suit. It’s hard to see even the more likely candidates, like The Guardian, being strong enough to resist given its own troubles. For some newspapers, the Murdoch’s aim to charge for content is a last hope, arguing that the present situation simply isn’t sustainable. The biggest threat to the plans to charge for digital content is surely the BBC, which in effect has always charged for its content, but in the form of a subscription that most in UK are paying already. Hence, James Murdoch’s focus on the corporation in his speech, for it seems to me that encouraging an in-coming Conservative government to reign in the scope of the BBC is critical to making paid-for content work for News Corporation, at least in the UK.
Why pay for The Times coverage, for example, when the BBC is delivering not just the same, but content that is already more trusted by its consumers, for what appears to be ‘free’? This isn’t even to begin to talk about the enormously complex media landscape we are now in – online newspaper content is competing (and often losing) against a whole range of aggregators, blogs (which, lets not forget, some of its journalism is reliant on) which don’t charge in any conventional sense.
I don’t doubt that somewhere along the line, money is going to have to change hands in order for digital publishing of the kind we see today to continue, but I have serious doubts that a simple charging model between publisher and consumer is going to be it. Instead, it seems more likely to be in extracting value from the highly personalised, targetted segmentation that digital can offer – for example, offering content for free but behind a registration that ties the user to the social network of choice (hang on, doesn’t News Corporation own one of those?) – is where the greatest hope lies. Murdoch thinks otherwise:
‘The challenge around asking people to pay pay for something is not as difficult to understand as some people might think. Its pretty simple. We found similar arguments 20 years ago when Sky launched and people said “People won’t pay. They have four channels”’
As Gruber succinctly put it, ‘Good luck with that’.
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