It’s been a week of contrasts; the British Summer delivering rain and sun, big profits and losses as the banks report their half-yearly results, and eye-watering financial loses with companies like ITV and NewsCorp. Yet the stock markets are surging and sterling is rallying against the dollar and the Euro. It’s a quiet news month for sure; the news story that ‘broke’ at 6am on Breakfast News is still the main headline at 10pm that night so trying to track the truffle or nugget of a news gem from the sea of nothingness can take some sifting.
The story that pricked my ears up this week was Rupert Murdoch’s plans to end free news. With the whiff of something that was less than coincidental, The Sunday Times published an article last Sunday attacking the BBC’s unfair advantage with it’s free news coverage and its potential to undermine journalism. News Corp owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US and reported a loss of $3.4bn (£2bn) in the year to June 2009. Main reason – plummeting advertising revenue
No surprises so far, what got me radar twitching was Rupert’s comments; “Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting,” he said. I have enjoyed the spats between Murdoch and the BBC for the last 20 years, it’s like watching 2 siblings having a tiff in a sandpit, but what price would you pay for news? And more to the point how do you determine ‘quality’ when the underlying motive is profit?
News Corp is the media conglomerate that owns the TV outlets Sky TV in the UK and Fox News in the USA. To extend this idea of ‘paying for QUALITY content’ and the recent major media story, the death of Michael Jackson, how many people would have ‘paid’ to see the video of the ambulance leaving Michael Jackson’s home? What quality criteria would that be measured against versus the clamber to make a quick buck on a breaking news event?
In the USA this business model may re-fill some of the large revenue hole vacated by the retracting advertising revenue, but in the UK the BBC remains the fly in the ointment to Murdoch’s monopolisation strategy. Sky News is 20 years old this year and whilst it has seen many, many makeovers and format changes, in my opinion, continues to struggle in the quality measurement against the BBC. Not least when the channel already has advert breaks and the irritation of a certain airline ‘sponsoring’ the weather?! I am sure that real time business and market content will continue to be a premium on some of the NewsCorp owned brands like the Financial Times, but what else could be cherry picked as desirable if this dash for cash goes ahead? Who would you trust for news, and would you pay for that?
