Crikey, I’m coming back
Will people pay to read Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers online? Not if they remain unresponsive to reader needs and keep pushing out pap. It doesn’t mean newspapers are dead, for readers have been paying for good-quality news and commentary online for a long time.
I remember buying my first annual subscription to David Frith’s CDN news email service back when there was no such thing as a web page and it was delivered by fax. There’s still no website for CDN that I’m aware of — each morning it goes out as a PDF attachment to an email. Despite having no home on the web, CDN’s closely-targeted, exclusive stories mean it’s a small but long-lived business that pays mortgages (though not mortgages the size of Rupert’s).
I remember speaking to Stephen Mayne’s wife (though I forget her name) a decade ago about putting an advertisement in Crikey, which was then only available as an email newsletter because CMSs were huge, bespoke, expensive things small businesses couldn’t afford. I wanted CPMs and CPCs and monthly unique visitor numbers and the best poor Crikey could do back then was tell me how many email subscribers they had — there wasn’t even such a thing as an open rate metric back then.
The ad got a great response because Crikey had a small but homogenous audience, they were exactly who I needed to reach, and they were engaged enough to pay for a subscription.
Over the years my subscription to both CDN and Crikey have lapsed, but today I started a new subscription to Crikey. I want to remain a writer, and if writers of the future will be writing for a paid subscription audience, I better learn more about the kind of writing my audience is willing to pay for.
Crikey, I’m back.
After a long absence, I am once again paying for my daily online news. Dwell on that, Rupert...
2 Responses to “Crikey, I’m coming back”
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If I was still living in Australia, I'd subscribe to Crikey. It's worth it. I'd think about the AFR too, even though its pricey.
I don't think you can say the same about any of the big metro newspaper websites though – in Australia, New Zealand or anywhere else for that matter.
While they do have some decent journalism, the things that newspapers are best at, the long-form well-researched stories, don't translate well to the internet. It's so much easier to read that material in a printed paper.
And it's usually cheaper too. For some reason, print subscriptions typically sell for less than online ones.
Given most of the material is undifferentiated. And the bulk of international material is available elsewhere, the metro papers will need to invest a lot of money hiring more journalists to dig out relevant local stories if they want to make themselves attractive to digital subscribers. That's unlikely to happen given the current mindset.
Thanks Bill, really good point about the price of print newspaper
subs, they have been very low for a long time and always being offered
with discounts. I think/hope the future of long-form investigative
journalism is in weekly/monthly print magazines and the video podcast
format.
For the regular daily news, I would like to be able to subscribe to
the news agencies directly and just cut out the middle man. I can
probably assemble my own daily news much more efficiently with a
recommendation algorithm and crowd-sourced tagging/rating. And at
lower cost than Rupert does by paying a journalist to sit at a news
desk.