Ciaran Jones, writing yesterday on journalism.co.uk explains how he was seduced by "the culture of free".
It's an excellent explanation of the process because it illustrates the difficulty of trying to convince people raised in such a culture to change their habits.
It began in his youth, he says, with visits to the library and the freedom to take home books. It continued with secondary school visits to friends' houses and the opportunity to listen to downloaded music, some of which was burned on to CDs.
"And so it came to pass with newspapers. First I stopped buying them during the week, when I could read them for nothing in our sixth form common room.
And then, when I went to university, I practically stopped buying them altogether, preferring instead to spend an hour or two every morning after breakfast sifting through the websites of nearly every national newspaper...
Newspapers [meaning print editions] were only for journeys or days when I had no access to the internet...
Looking back on all that, it seems like there is a curse of availability. As soon as something is out there, freely – meaning both widely and free of charge – the temptation to actually dip into your pocket and pay for it is substantially reduced.
So the prospect of making Generation Y pay for content looks, to me, highly unlikely. The genie is out of the bottle now, and it won't go back in."
But Jones does not leave it there. In effect, he calls on media companies to attract a paying public by making new bottles.
"The key is in diversifying to survive, and finding what people want – and are prepared to pay for – that they cannot easily get for free elsewhere.
In media terms – and particularly newspaper terms – that might be in customisable apps, or selling discrete portions of output (perhaps by micro-payment, perhaps by subscription service), or in podcasts or web chats or in something quite different."
In other words: innovate, exploit niche content, think harder. And, of course, when it comes to news, maintain the culture of free.
Source: journalism.co.uk
