傳統報紙要如何面對網路挑戰？優良的報導內容、評論與照片都所費不貲，要經營一個報社或是網路上的新聞網站都是十分昂貴。
英國的BBC是我長年來很喜歡讀的新聞網，一方面它的報導範圍寬廣，資料豐富，而且免費，它好像也是從去年，還是前年才開始有廣告。紐約時報的內容也很棒，可是以前要成為付費的 Premium Member才能閱讀一些名家的專欄，或是特別報導。自從梅鐸入主紐約時報後沒多久，紐約時報的經營就改弦易轍，把內容通通免費公開，而且可以查詢其舊日的報導。
報社是靠甚麼在賺錢呢？一份十元或十五元的報紙嗎？報紙的售價大概只夠支付紙張與印刷，甚至可能還無法支付配送呢！自由時報創刊時，不但有許多免費贈送，訂戶還可以參加「百萬黃金」與轎車的抽獎。可見得賣報紙根本不是賺錢的來源。有些人會說是賣廣告，想法是對了，但是不能算正確。真正地說報紙和許多雜誌都是靠賣其「流通量(Circulation)」，來賺錢的。就像是許多網站也是靠其「點閱率」來吸引廣告主來刊登廣告一像。
在這波經濟不景氣的衝擊下，許多公司都大砍廣告預算，因此這些靠廣告賺錢的媒體，都受了不小衝擊。梅鐸還沒接手紐約時報前，紐約時報雖然收費，仍面臨鉅額虧損。在免費提供其內容之後，現在看來，也還是虧損。
Google 是當今最賺錢的網路公司了，提供種種免費「雲端服務」 Gmail, Map, Document, Calendar, Picasa, Youtube, Earth, ..etc. 全部免費，使用者受惠， Google 也賺錢。我一直認為這是真正的「幸福經濟」。The New York Times在不收費之後，我也天真的以為The New York Times成為了這種「幸福經濟」的一環，讀者享受高品質的內容，而紐約時報公司也可以獲利。顯然免費開放內容，並未為 The New York Times 帶來足夠的網上讀者，或其網上讀者的閱讀習慣，不符廣告主的預期。
專業報像 Financial Times, Wall Street Journal 或許收費仍可吸引專業讀者的青睞，那像 The New York Times 呢？在這個講究「專業」與「創新」的時代，網路帶給傳統報社的挑戰，似乎也只有用「專業」與「創新」才能解決。目前看到最有創意的便是德國的 Axel Springer 公司，這家擁有歐洲發行量最大的報紙 Bild 的公司，今年三月公佈它創了開辦以來62年的最高獲利。Axel Springer 提高報紙售價，而且不僅沒有保護自家的出版內容，它還將它的報導內容，以原內容或重新創作，或改編賣給其他媒體。就像一些電子廠商，不但販售自家品牌的產品，另一方面也作 OEM/ODM, 或販賣用在自家產品上的一些元件；為了販賣元件也作一些修改或客製化服務。
如果 The New York Times, The Times..等等梅鐸「新聞集團(News Corporation)」所擁有的報社要開始向網路讀者收費的話，我應該還有BBC World Service可以看免費的吧！(BBC 和 British Museum是今日英國還可以讓人感受到昔日「日不落帝國」光輝的兩個組織。)
The Paper That Doesn’t Want to Be Free
Financial Times
TheFinancial Times, read by business people, has gladly kept its onlinecontent behind a pay wall. Pinched by falling advertising revenue, evenmainstream newspapers may follow its lead.
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: August 16, 2009
Notlong ago, when other media executives were convinced that the only wayto succeed on the Web was to give away their content, The FinancialTimes played the eccentric.
“We were regarded as slightly freakish,” says John Ridding, the newspaper’s chief executive.
Indeed,the newspaper started charging readers for access to its Web site in 2002. Now, with few signs that advertising is rebounding from a deep slump, and with other publishers moving to imitate FT.com by erecting so-called pay walls, Mr. Ridding feels vindicated.
“It was pretty lonely out there for a while in paid land,” he said last week.“But it has become pretty clear that advertising alone is not going to sustain online business models. Quality journalism has to be paid for.”
Now The Financial Times is adding to its paid-content strategy with aplan to accept micro payments for individual articles, as analternative to a subscription.
|  John Ridding, the chief executive of The Financial Times. |
And one by one, other publishers are starting to see wisdom in the paper’s ways. Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of the News Corporation, said this month that the company intended to charge for all its news Websites. That plan would have the company’s major newspapers in the United States, Britain and Australia joining their sister newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, which already charges for access to most of its site.Executives of The New York Times have said they are considering ways to get readers to pay for online access, though they have yet to disclose specific plans.
That is a big change from
2007, when The Times site abandoned a pay wall for some content, concluding that it was restricting the potential for online advertising, despite the site’s having attracted
227,000 paying customers.Around the same time, Mr. Murdoch was saying publicly that he might drop the pay wall around the Web site of The Wall Street Journal, which the News Corporation was in the process of acquiring.
With luxury goods companies, banks and other advertisers cutting back in this economic recession, ad revenue has fallen sharply at The Financial Times, as it has at other papers. Pearson, the London-based publisherthat owns the paper, does not break out separate figures for it, but analysts say its
ad revenue is probably down at least 20 percent compared with last year.Pearson said last month that operating profit at FT Publishing, the unit that includes The Financial Times, h
ad fallen 40 percent in the first half of the year, with revenue down 13 percent.
The print circulation has also fallen, with sales in June down 7 percent from a year earlier, to about 412,000 copies, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in Britain.
FT.com has not attracted a huge paying audience, with about 117,000 worldwide, up from 101,000 in 2007. That is far short of the one million paying customers of The Journal’s Web site.
Yet FT.com is lucrative because it charges a premium for its content. A premium subscription to the Web site, with access to all content, costs $300 a year in the United States. Adding the print version costs $100 more.
Because of rate increases by FT.com, revenue from Web subscriptions has risen 30 percent over the last year, Mr. Ridding said. The Financial Times has also raised the price of its print editions.
In another effort to generate additional digital revenue, the newspaper restricted access last year to its content through databases like Factiva and Lexis Nexis, requiring users to buy special licenses to read archived articles. More than 600 corporate customers, with a total of about 50,000 users, have done so.
The price of a subscription to the databases “wasn’t reflecting the value of what we were producing,” Mr.Ridding said. “So we took control of the pricing,” he said, adding that the change led to “robust revenue growth.”
Also last year, The Financial Times acquired Money-Media, an online provider of news for fund managers that charges a subscription fee. Last week, it acquired Mandate Wire, a digital provider of news on the pension fund business.
The newspaper also recently started an online newsletter for investors in China, called China Confidential, which costs $4,138 a year.
The growth of paid online services under the Financial Times banner shows that the paper was right to maintain pay walls at a time when other media companies were yielding to the Silicon Valley mantra that “information wants to be free,” said Tim Luckhurst, a journalism professor at the University of Kent in Britain and a former editor of The Scotsman.
“It has proved, in one niche at least, that editorial journalistic endeavor does create value,” he said.
For other online publishers seeking to charge readers, the big question is whether consumers would be willing to pay for general news, as opposed to specialized financial news. Some analysts doubt it, but Mr. Ridding said he thought they might.
“I sometimes think there’s too much fatalism around — people throwing up their hands and saying it’s not possible for general publishers to charge,” Mr. Ridding said. “I think it is possible, and necessary, for them to charge.”
In an effort to generate more revenue from casual users, The Financial Times plans to fine-tune its Web business, which currently gives readers 10 free articles a month before they are required to pay for access.
Mr. Ridding said the site would add a new form of paid Web access next year involving micro payments for individual articles, something that Wall Street Journal executives are also said to be considering. That way readers would be able to buy individual articles in lieu of subscribing.
FT.com’s system is aimed at retaining infrequent readers who arrive at the site from a search engine. The goal is to keep the site accessible to a wide audience for advertising purposes.
Despite the downturn, advertising remains an important revenue generator for newspaper Websites. Rob Noss, who runs the luxury group at Mindshare Worldwide, amedia buying agency, said it was still unclear how readers of newspaper sites would respond to advertising if they were required to pay for access to the sites.
“My personal view is that
if I’ve paid for the information, my openness to the advertising will be affected,” he said.
Not every digital initiative of The Financial Times involves pay walls. This fall, the paper plans to introduce a stand-alone Web version of its weekly magazine How to Spend It, a forum for luxury advertisers. Mr. Ridding said that at least at the beginning, access would be free.
Analysts say The Financial Times could face a renewed threat from The Journal, particularly if Mr. Murdoch developed an innovative model for charging on the Web. Mr. Luckhurst, for example, thinks The Journal will package subscriptions to the paper with other News Corporation content.
But The Financial Times is not facing the “existential crisis” that confronts some other newspapers, Mr. Ridding said. “It all stems from a belief in the value of our journalism,” he said. “We are pretty happy with how things have developed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/business/media/17ft.html跨國媒體大亨梅鐸5日表示，旗下的新聞網站將在明年6月前全數改為收費制，因為「優質新聞的成本不便宜，免費供應內容的產業只會侵蝕自己優質報導的能力」。
英國金融時報總編輯巴柏（Lionel Barber）6日更大膽預言，絕大多數新聞媒體將在未來一年內對讀者收費。
梅鐸為「新聞集團」總裁，其媒體版圖遍及澳洲、美國和英國等地，旗下新聞媒體在英國有泰晤士報、太陽報、世界新聞報，在美國有華爾街日報、紐約郵報，甚至福斯新聞頻道和社交網站MySpace，在亞洲則有星空傳媒。
梅鐸5日公布第四季財報虧損2億300萬美元（台幣66億3800萬元）後，宣布旗下新聞網站將在這個會計年度結束前改為付費制。
梅鐸表示：「過去這一年是晚近歷史上最困難的一年，我們2009年的財務表現清楚反映疲弱的經濟大環境。」
梅鐸指出，經營報紙費用高昂，若網路版再不收費，報紙將很難保持品質。他說：「有關收費模式的可行性已經完成。我願意冒這個險，安排旗下所有新聞網站都要收費。如果我們成功的話，相信其他媒體也會跟進。」
梅鐸不擔心會因此喪失讀者，但坦承付費網路新聞仍可能因為便利的網路而四處流竄，但「我們將在每個地方主張我們的版權。」
英國「金融時報」總編輯巴柏6日表示，建立付費的新聞網絡平台曾是媒體面臨的挑戰之一，「我確信未來12個月內，幾乎所有的新聞機構都將針對內容收費。唯一的問題是按閱讀文章數收費或是按月收費。」
除梅鐸領導的「新聞集團」外，紐約時報也考慮對上網看紐時的讀者每月收取5美元（台幣165元）。
【2009/08/07 聯合報】
European Newspapers Find Creative Ways to Thrive in the Internet Age
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: March 29, 2009
PARIS — As the death toll in the American newspaper industry mounted this month, the German publisher Axel Springer, which owns Bild, the biggest newspaper in Europe, reported the highest profit in its 62-year history.
At Springer’s headquarters in Berlin, there has been no desperate talk of how to survive the recession and the digital revolution. Instead, Mathias Döpfner, Springer’s chief executive, said he was looking for opportunities to expand, scouting around for acquisitions in Germany, Eastern Europe and maybe — in what would be a first for the company — the United States.
“I don’t believe in the end of journalism,” Mr. Döpfner said. “On the contrary, I think the crisis can have a positive impact. The number of players will diminish, but the strong players may be stabler after the crisis.”
In much of the world, American newspapers are seen as journalism’s gold standard. But the American newspaper’s business model appears to be broken. While much of Europe faces many of the same problems, a few newspaper publishers have found innovative ways not only to survive, but thrive in the face of the recession and the Internet.
Few European publishers performed as well as Axel Springer last year, and even it has warned that 2009 will be much harder as recession takes its toll. In some European countries, newspapers are in worse shape than in the United States. In France, several papers are kept alive by public subsidies. In the ultracompetitive British market, national papers struggle to make money and local newspapers are disappearing at an accelerating rate.
But there are signs of journalistic life in Europe. Circulation is falling more slowly than in the United States. Most papers have been less affected by the recession than their American counterparts because they rely on readers more than on advertisers, who tend to be more fickle.
Though no one has found a magic bullet, some European publishers have found ways to meet the challenges. At Schibsted, an Oslo-based publisher, online activities — including newspapers, classified advertising sites and other pursuits — deliver about a quarter of the company’s revenue and the vast majority of its profit.
The star performer online is VG Nett, a Web site loosely affiliated with Verdens Gang, a tabloid newspaper. VG Nett has a profit margin of more than 30 percent and rivals Google as the most popular Web site in Norway.
VG Nett, like most newspaper Web sites, generates most of its revenue from advertising, but is starting to raise money from users. About 150,000 people pay up to 599 crowns, or nearly $90, a year for a weight-loss club. VG Nett recently started charging up to 780 crowns a year for live streams of soccer matches. And a social network connected with VG Nett charges users to upgrade their profiles. Access to news, however, remains free.
A business that has lost more than a quarter of its global sales over the last decade might not seem like the best example to follow. But alongside the wreckage left by digital piracy, new business models are emerging in the music industry — with Europe in the vanguard.
Few Europeans willing to pay for music directly, through services like iTunes, so the industry is instead bundling music costs into a broadband subscription, like basic cable channels do in the United States.
The Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, skeptical of applying micropayments to newspapers, has suggested providing access to newspaper Web sites for a fee paid at the Internet service provider level. For such models to succeed, newspapers would have to work together.
A group of newspapers in the French-speaking part of Belgium have shown the possibilities and the limitations of cooperating when faced with Google, which some see as a common enemy.
Two years ago, under the banner of their trade organization, Copiepresse, the papers won a ruling in a Belgian court requiring Google to remove their content from its Google News service, which summarizes newspaper articles and provides links to their Web sites. The Belgian papers argued that Google News had violated their copyrights; an appeal is pending.
When Google wanted to expand Google News to Denmark about two years ago, lawyers for Danish publishers wrote to the company, telling them they could not do so without permission.
This has not helped newspapers earn money online, but Margaret Boribon, secretary general of Copiepresse, said, “the main issue for us is not having giants killing us.”
Axel Springer generates 14 percent of its revenue online, more than most American newspapers, even though the markets in which it operates — primarily Germany and Eastern Europe — are less digitally developed than the United States.
One reason, Mr. Döpfner said, is that Axel Springer has dared to compete with itself. Instead of trying to protect existing publications, it acquired or created new ones, some of which distribute the same content to different audiences.
At one newsroom in Berlin, for example, journalists produce content for six publications: the national newspaper Die Welt, its Sunday edition and a tabloid version aimed at younger readers; a local paper called Berliner Morgenpost, and two Web sites.
Though advertising has slumped in Germany, Axel Springer has been able to offset the shortfall by raising the price of publications like Bild, which sells more than three million copies. Now Axel Springer is looking for “undervalued assets” to buy.
Mr. Döpfner said the company would even have a look in the United States “if a meaningful position arises in a significant market.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/business/media/30paper.html
The stories of "The Paper That Doesn’t Want to Be Free" & "European Papers Find Creative Ways to thrive in the Internet Age" were taken from the New York Times, and the one in Chinese, United Daily News 聯合報 The copyright remains with their original owners. The authors of the stories, the New York Times, and United Daily News 聯合報 are not involved with, nor endorse the production of this blog. The New York Times is the registered trademark of The New York Times Company.
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