They Blog For You

YES. Obviously. And that’s why I’ll be signing up to pay for access to The Times behind its shiny new paywall.

The idea of actually paying for news is making a lot of people very angry. In fact, the idea of paying for anything on the internet is making a lot of people angry. Music, films, TV shows, news coverage – anything that can be digitised and distributed over the web can be downloaded for free. And, according to some, if something can be made available for free, then it must be made available for free.

These same web users believe that journalists, musicians, writers, actors, technicians, designers and engineers should all be working for us for free, out of the goodness of their hearts. After all, if you’ve been clever enough to buy a computer, connect it to a modem and then double-click on an internet browser icon, then that means you deserve all that free content, doesn’t it?

It’s in all our interests to make web-based journalism pay. We need good, well-funded journalism; a vibrant free press is essential to any democracy. Ask yourself: would our nation be better or worse off had the Telegraph not been able to resource its investigation into MPs’ expenses last year?

Built into The Times’s business model for their new paywall is an assumption that 95 per cent of its current users will refuse to pay for its content and will seek free content elsewhere, which is a perfectly reasonable assumption and, if you’re a web user, a perfectly reasonable course of action to take.

So I hope that the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Independent will, in due course, follow News International’s lead, forcing those still determined to get their broadsheet news for free to rely on the BBC website. “Ah, but there are still blogs,” I hear you say. But blogs are, on the whole, amateur affairs, offering plenty of subjective opinion and the occasional interesting fact, spun in a particular direction. The USP of any newspaper worth the name is journalism.

Journalists aren’t born – they’re trained. And training requires investment. Newspaper groups at both national and local level have invested colossal levels of resources over generations to provide training for many thousands of journalists. Which is why today in Britain we have such a high standard of writing by such a diverse range of professionals.

In a previous incarnation, my job was to collate relevant news articles each morning for distribution to senior officials in my organisation. But none of the articles cut out of the newspapers and photocopied 15 or 20 times was my or my employer’s property; they were the intellectual property of the news organisations who had used their own resources in order to deliver the news to me. Which is why my employer was obliged – rightly – to pay for the privilege of photocopying and distributing those articles. The financial penalty for not doing so would have been substantial.

So why should the situation be any different today? In my own constituency office there’s barely a newspaper to be seen. My staff glean all the news they require from existing free news content on the web. We no longer have to buy individual copies of newspapers, so we pay nothing in return for a vital service provided by journalists who still need to be paid.

It’s not a sustainable situation. If we value journalism, we will find ways of making journalism pay, of rewarding the efforts and skills of reporters. If we can’t do that, we can say goodbye not only to diversity on our newsstands, but to professional levels of journalistic training. After all, why would any privately-run news organisation invest in training if there is no prospect of making a return on that investment?

In journalism as in everything else, you get what you pay for. And if we don’t want to pay for quality writing, then that is precisely what we will not get.