High fashion, high stakes

Today, I turn my blogging attention to the world of fashion. Surprised? I don’t see why, those who know me well also know that I can admire a crop-top or a crocheted stitch as much as the next man.

Anyway, I will defend myself no more, the big news is that Times fashion editor Lisa Armstrong and her deputy Luke Leitch have jumped ship to the Telegraph who are cock-a-hoop at their coup. However, there is more to this than meets the eye. Apparently, this is no mere case of the Telegraph dangling much gold in front of The Times’ star pair.

According to rumour (Roy Greenslade’s blog to be exact) both Armstrong and Leitch have become increasingly disenchanted with The Times’ paywall which has seen their readership drop and have resorted to “tweeting like crazy” to maintain their links with readers. Greenslade, in fact, describes them as “paywall refugees”.

This has happened before. When the New York Times erected a paywall around its OpEd pages many years ago the columnists rebelled. Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman etal threw their toys out of the pram and demanded the return of their readership.

Why? Because those journalists working at the pinnacle of their profession are not mere writers anymore, they are ‘brands’ for whom the weekly column is a loss-leader to get their message to the wider world in the hope that we all then go and buy their books. Think I’m kidding? Try searching any of the names listed above on the Amazon US website and see how many books they’ve each written. Brooks, for example, is currently #2 on the New York Times Non-fiction Bestsellers List.

Can we expect to see a similar rebellion over here? I’ve got news for you, we already are! Armstrong is a contributing editor to Vogue and has written multiple books, both fiction and non-fiction, all with a fashion twist.

An anonymous life behind the Times paywall is no good to her!

Yoda doubles the bet

Whilst I have enjoyed the summer (well I enjoyed the early summer, the last few weeks have been awful with the weather) it will be something of a relief to return to normality in terms of business announcements and general news as we move into Autumn. There’s certainly been the usual July/August lull but I confidently predict that, with the Chancellor’s Spending Review due in October and the US Mid-Term Elections due in November, there will be plenty to rant about in the coming months.

However, one story has caught my eye in recent days, namely the rumours that all of News International’s titles are to vanish behind paywalls and that includes The Sun and The News of the World. Roy Greenslade in the Guardian is intensely sceptical of this move and it certainly appears that Rupert Murdoch, or Yoda as he was once described to me by a News International employee who had to go and pitch an idea to him in New York, is upping the ante and going for broke with his paywall strategy before the rest of us have any idea whether it is working or not.

Supreme confidence based on a view of their internal subscription numbers or classic bullying tactics? Time will tell, but what is clear is that the rest of us need sight of two key metrics before we can judge whether this is working or not.

Firstly, revenue from online subscriptions. This is obviously a key number but it is important we strip out those, like a client of mine, who has a year’s free subscription to the new Times site. At the moment, News International is keeping this information very close to its chest.

Secondly, newspaper circulation figures. One theory is that News International is hoping that the paywall drives people back to the print version. If circulation numbers increase, and it’s a big ask considering The Times’ circulation dropped by circa 90,000 readers from June ’09 to June this year, then there might be some method to what they are doing.

We might get some daylight on this when News Corporation issues its fourth quarter results in early November, but don’t hold your breath. NewsCorp is an enormous beast including Fox News, 20th Century Fox, BSkyB, MySpace, book publishers like Harper Collins and international newspapers like the Wall Street Journal. UK newspaper revenue usually only accounts for about five lines in their quarterly statements.

Brooke gets to the heart of the paywall question

I deliberately haven’t commented on the Times’ paywall numbers (readership down 90 per cent) which were issued earlier this week as I think it is important that this experiment is given a fair shout without too much sniping from the sidelines, especially from a PR man!

However, I can’t help but comment on an interesting little aside from journalist Heather Brooke on her website in which she defends her decision to go and work for the Times behind their paywall. She had this to say on her blog: “I actually believe journalism must improve if the Times is asking people to pay for it, as readers are not going to pay for inaccurate rumour or propaganda. They can get that anywhere – for free.”

If what Brookes is saying is that paywalls will mean an end to ‘churnalism’ (the running of news stories cribbed from other sources without any fact checking or further information being provided), more original content, more investigative reporting, better and more incisive comment, then she could be onto something.

Of course, the issue is that all of the above has a cost attributed, mainly in the form of actually having more journalists, which destroys margins. After a decade of ever-shrinking editorial departments this would be a considerable volte face for the industry and most importantly its proprietors.

Er … define ‘quality journalism’ for me Mr Murdoch?

If you are going to lecture the UK population about product quality it is best if your own wares are pretty damn fireproof.

It was with some interest therefore that I read Roy Greenslade’s always superb blog in today’s Guardian which can be viewed HERE. For those that are short of time it appears that the Sunday Times, complete with its own brand new paywall, has lifted, unattributably, a story from a free website called Gentlemen Ranters for use in its own paper. In other words, the Sunday Times has taken a free story and then tried to charge people for reading it!

My own view has always been that the bullish comments made by News International senior executives prior to the launch of paywalls for The Times and The Sunday Times were a hostage to fortune. To be blunt, if you are going to tell people that they are going to have to pay for a quality product, then by definition you have to provide a quality product, namely credible, well written, informative news that I can’t find elsewhere for free.

In previous blogs I’ve questioned whether The Times has the quality of columnists it once had since the departures and disappearances of Peter Riddell, Alice Miles etal to merit a paywall, but I am well aware that the issue of journalism quality is a murky pond for a PR man to wade into. Suffice to say that with today’s little scoop, Greenslade, a former editor of the Daily Mirror, has given the next generation of journalists a glimpse of what a good, well researched story is all about.

I suspect that somebody at the Sunday Times has had their knuckles rapped today but it would be wrong to single out individuals. The whole paper is going to have to do better than this.

Rupert to internet, “it’s war!”

Interesting times in MediaLand. It appears that Ruper Murdoch is close to finalising his plans for a war with the internet by introducing a paywall for TimesOnline to go live in May or June this year. His bullishness (or stubbornness depending on whether you are a Rupert supporter) appears well-placed with the news that FT.com, owned by the Pearson Group, has achieved a 46 per cent increase in subscriptions over the last year.

We need to take a step back a moment though. The Financial Times is a highly specialist publication offering excellent economic and sectoral analysis which people will pay for – often to help them do their jobs. Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal has also achieved very good results with payment for content, again in its own specialist sector, which is maybe what has pushed him down this road with The Times.

In other parts of MediaLand however payment is definitely off the agenda and working. Word this week is that audited circulation figures of the Evening Standard, which went free late last year, have risen by 146 per cent.

What do we make of all this? My view all along is that The Times is too generalist a newspaper for a paywall to work. Certainly I suspect they will have to use different metrics to measure their readership based on quality rather than quantity if they are to convince advertisers that this is the future.

A fighting retreat?

News Corporation’s interim results make for fairly boring reading, but there was apparently an interesting little exchange during the press conference Q&A in New York, a report of which can be read HERE. As you may well know, Rupert is planning to introduce a pay-wall on all his online news sites and had provisionally targeted June 2010 as D-Day.

When asked about his self-imposed deadline yesterday, he said, and I quote: "I wouldn't promise that we're going to meet that date." Acting unnaturally coy, he then declined to comment on the reasons for any delay except to say that he was talking to rival publishers, including the Telegraph group. "It's a work in progress and there's a huge amount of work going on," Murdoch said.

Two thoughts. Firstly, as I’ve said before on this blog, I’d be interested to know what the Office of Fair Trading think about an attempt by British newspapers to act in concert to fix prices.

Secondly, it is hard not to speculate that this might be the start of a climbdown. Rupert is known to be a luddite at heart, once famously commenting after News Corporation’s acquisition of My Space that “we’re in the stalking business now.” Could it be that he made company policy “on the hoof” and his minnions have now told him that this isn’t going to fly?

The logistics of payment for content are fearsome. The Guardian, in my opinion the best of the online sites and ‘owner’ of more ‘must read’ columnists than any other newspaper (Simon Jenkins, Polly Toynbee, Will Hutton etal), has already declared it will remain free. So that’s at least one hole in his apparent attempts to corral the industry to his way of thinking.