How the January storms swept the paywall argument out to sea

In the months running up to Christmas, it felt as if the paywall argument was gathering some momentum within the regional press again.

At an NCTJ conference in November, deputy editor of the Bournemouth Echo Andy Martin said he’d introduce a paywall tomorrow, arguing that the industry should never have given away the ‘valuable commodity’ of online news. He argued that he had such confidence in the quality of his newsroom’s journalism that he’d put a paywall up tomorrow. A number of Newsquest editors posted Tweets backing him up.

I’m sure those words will have been well received in the Bournemouth Echo newsroom, but arguing against a paywall isn’t about claiming our content isn’t worth anything. It’s about being aware of what’s going on online, and the fact that there’s precious little evidence that people will pay for local news.

In December, ex-Birmingham Mail editor Steve Dyson, a man who I suspect would be the first to wear the ‘Make them pay’ slogan as a badge if someone made them, delivered his ‘heroes of the year’ blog post on Hold the Front Page, with top billing going to Robin Burgess, boss of Cumbrian Newspapers, who has every intention to make the audience pay for his company’s news.

Indeed, the phrase he used was ‘the audience must pay’ during a keynote speech at the Society of Editors conference at the rather swanky Arden Forest Hotel near Meriden, in the West Midlands, back in April.

The notion that the audience must pay is one which maybe sounds appealing – and certainly got heads nodding – when in a conference room overlooking a golf course with deer skipping past from time to time. However, in the cold light of day, looking out from the Cumbrian Newspapers HQ in Carlisle, surrounded with terraced roofs stretching into the distance, I would imagine it doesn’t feel as simple as that.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I would like nothing more than for an established audience to pop up and say ‘We’ll pay for your content, just keep providing the same random mix of news and sport which is connected by nothing more than geography and I’ll be happy.’ It would be problem solved. But it’s not going to happen.

And I think the storms which many parts of the country have endured over recent weeks have demonstrated that we, as a regional industry, have the capacity to be indispensable, as I saw for myself when I looked at our audience figures in December for websites in Cardiff, North Wales, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Surrey, Berkshire and the Midlands – suggesting Dyson’s latest critique of digital at Trinity Mirror is a little out of date.

Beyond the websites I work with, Local World titles in the south west updated people around the clock as storms lashed the coast, as did Newsquest sites in Mid Wales and in Hampshire and Dorset. I’m sure there were many more, and the photography across these sites and beyond was stunning.

But imagine, just for a moment, if we’d had paywalls around our sites – be they full, pay-or-sod-off paywalls or pay-as-you-go model. What do you think would have happened? Would people, up to their ankles in water and without power be digging out their debit cards to log on via their mobiles? Would worried relatives elsewhere in the country link your website to their Paypal account to keep up to speed with your live blog?

No, of course they wouldn’t. They’d have gone to Twitter, where police forces share information by the minutes. Followed new pages on Facebook, where the Environment Agency was actively driving users when appearing on broadcast media. They could have searched Google and found any one of the traditional national newspaper brands now hoovering up any agency copy they can find. Or checked out the BBC, which is superb at cross promotion. Or discovered hyperlocal sites run for passion or for money … and never again thought twice about us.

The best example I can give of this is the website Burnham-on-sea.com. I learnt of its existence on BBC News on the Sunday night of the floods which hit the south east, after it credited the website with providing this image:

You might have read the story – about local volunteers rescuing a woman, and her dog Elvis, who has been stranded for 13 days as the flood waters settled. Looking around on Sunday night, no other local website, be it the local weekly or daily newspaper, had the story or image. By 5pm the next day, they all did. But by then, the story was old. It began life on a hyperlocal site and spread to the BBC quickly.

That shows the competition we have around us now, in the space we used to consider our own. It’s why I roll my eyes when media pundits compare the digital performance of regional press publishers. With the odd exception, we aren’t rivals, if we ever really were. We have many other rivals out there … and for as long as they’re prepared to either distribute news for free or provide a platform, for free, where people can build their own communities of interest, which is what we all do on Facebook, paywalls will be more likely to fail or not.

Paywalls offer  a neat conclusion in the minds of many journalists: ‘Our work has a worth, therefore people should pay. That solves the revenue problem.’ Sadly, that’s not the case. The audience determines the value of our content to them, the market availability of content dictates the price. And that’s the way it has always been.

The business of regional journalism has always been about finding ways to make money from our content. For a long time, audiences would pay for daily or weekly newspapers, providing a good mix of revenues from cover price and advertising. For a long time, freesheets could survive packed full of advertising with a lot less content because of the distribution figures they could claim. But there are many free newspapers which prided themselves on brilliant content every week – as I learnt as a trainee at the Chorley and Preston Citizen newspapers – without a cover price.

Then, Newsquest could justify editorial teams because the revenue was there. The challenge is no different now. We have the potential to create great content, we just need to find the revenue model. There is no rule which says the audience must pay, or that free content is poor content. The rule is that we must make money from the audience in a way they find acceptable. Anything else shows a lack of respect for that audience … and the storms of January 2014 proved that once and for all for me.