(From Broadsight's ever-thoughtful Paul Lancefield)
Last week I got the new Sunday Times app on the iPad. The subscription is £2 per week for six days of The Times and the Sunday Times, as you would expect, on Sunday. The operative concept is that it is a news magazine. They are offering 1 month for free to new subscribers. The overall experience is really very good. Much better than I was expecting actually.
Having been using New's International's The Times app and from last week, their Sunday Times application, I'm going to make a prediction about the future of online news. My verdict is, though it may take time to grow, Murdoch's venture onto tablets and paid for news is going to win out. 100% it will. Just as before the iPad launch I was thinking "yep I'd love one, but will it really work for most people as a product" and after it's launch I realised "yep it 100% works as a distinct product category in it's own right and it will really take off", so now I'm feeling the same degree of conviction regarding paid versus free news gathering.
Actually I'm feeling also, strangely, a little relieved. It's giving me much more what I want as a consumer and I have been wondering for some time how quality news would be gathered without it all degenerating into the news equivalent of the free tourist city guide books found on every desk in a hotel bedroom.
Of course some avid users of Twitter and advocates of Open data initiatives may not like the implications of my reasoning on this, so I will state upfront, I am not saying paid for news is the only show in town, nor am I taking a political stance. A rich news ecosystem will remain with paid and commercial free and web2.0 free and up to the minute. It's just that I'm now feel sure paid-for news can survive and thrive whereas before there was a big question mark over the sustainability of the model. Now there is a mechanism where investment can be rewarded and, low and behold, investment has been made and the result is really gratifying. The increase in value returned for my money, for me, far exceeds the £2 per week subscription cost (which gets me The Times and The Sunday Times).
Now my primary concern is how long it will take the Telegraph and The Guardian (in the UK) to follow suite. They risk being left for dead because currently they are facing an ever reducing budget for producing quality editorial. There is going to be steady growth in this as word gets out and as customers get the opportunity to try it on friend's devices and realise they also want news this way. Tablets have made the Free News situation a whole lot worse. Since I got my 3G enabled iPad, I haven't bought a single paper newspaper. Why would I? It would be interesting to check the impact of a tablet computer purchase on revenues from the customer. I wouldn't be surprised if for every Telegraph or Guardian reader who buys an iPad, paper sales revenues are decreased by at least 50% or more (and will decrease yet further over time). I would dearly love to know if there have been any studies yet that confirm this.
Now my fear is (and this is not healthy for the news industry), Twitter is going to end up being much more of a threat to commercial purveyors of free news (e.g. commercial companies funded by ad revenues) than paid for news. Free news has to maintain critical mass and compete with Web2.0, where paid-for news will be able to establish a virtuous circle with subscribers and real substantial subscription revenue with which to grow and improve a value product justifying the subscription.
You have to hand it to Murdoch that he invested big in Satellite at just the right time. But can the world afford for him to repeat the same trick with tablet hypermedia publishing? Of course he won't be able to monopolise the means in the same way as he managed with Sky but now he does have the rather distinct advantage of being able to leverage his paper publishing and TV operations all together.
I can't fully put my finger on why the The Sunday times app should be so much better than content accessed via a web browser.
- Partly it is due to the fact HTML5 isn't yet being used to it's full potential - you should be able to have the same on screen experience via open web technologies if it were. Part of the reason (following on from the last point) is because so much effort has been invested in the iPad version to ensure the full range of content is available. Partly also because, once a news/magazine producer has gathered all the material they have (e.g. the stories, the photo's, the live footage) that is gathered as part of the news day and edited it and prepared it for slick media presentation, it has the opportunity to become so much more than the same material in a static paper.
- The wealth of photographs alone and the high quality is quite something. Being able to touch almost every photo and instantly see it smoothly scale up to the high res version and being able to swipe between each photo in a story is truly a revelation. In traditional newspapers and magazines you get the large photo and then many small ones. On a tablet, they can all be large and colourful and add the kind of quality feel only previously found in dedicated photo-journals, only now that feel is mixed in with everyday news and magazine stories. And yes, video is also getting mixed in there in a much more intimate way, with the start and stop and scaling full screen or leaving it playing in-situ on the page and scrolling it off page all instantly and smoothly accessed. That browsing is a seamless uninterrupted experience without any of the pauses http entails is much more powerful and a more significant than I expected.
- And lastly of course, the most essential ingredient is that tablet computing provides a genuinely more intimate experience where smooth and natural operation is near-as-damn-it 100% of the time. None tablet form factors simply can't match it (it also underlines Google have to seriously work on the offline capabilities of Chrome OS if they are to maximise inroads on Apple and Microsoft - HTML5 should help here again of course).
I'm also realising something here about news gathering. We have this assumption people want up to the minute news. But what does up to the minute really mean for most people? The closer you get to the minute of occurrence, the less value there is for most people and the less value there can be. For nearly all news for nearly all people for nearly all the time there is no real tangible value from being up to the minute. For a start, up to the minute means minute by minute and most of the time we are doing something else and don't want interruption for what is mostly trivia.
Most people want, most of the time, at most, up to the half an hour or up to the hour, because they want someone to actually prepare a story for them. Most news stories don't affect them, their lives or their careers in any way. But they still read the stories. So most news reading is "entertainment," or "mental stimulation," or "mind expansion" but is almost certainly not for most people about upping personal productivity or getting better at your job (industry journals fill that role). So social media supplements and adds additional layers, nuances and - to a limited extent - competes with paid-for news, but my biggest realisation with the tablet form factor is that social-media surely doesn't replace paid-for news.
This is where someone like Murdoch has always excelled. He may seem like a dinosaur when you hear him talking about the Internet and Internet technologies. But where you or I might take an intellectual look at the potential for social-media to displace paid-for news, where we might conjecture about wiki style open editorial co-operatives taking over, a grizzled old news-dog like Murdoch comes along and applies his simple understanding of what selling news is all about. His instinct is "the people want news and we will work to give it to them and that doesn't happen for free." So he invests, provides a real news magazine experience and the price, if compared with the value of what you get back, is miniscule. Compare the volume of content of 5 Days of the Times and full content of The Sunday Times to the cost of a paperback to see what I mean. £2 for all that? It's peanuts. Murdoch opining on the Internet may, at times, have sounded like a fool but Murdoch the arch-capitalist selling news to punters is simply untouchable.
