Fairfax must take ‘tabloid sites’ upmarket to survive
Justin Norrie of The Conversation suggests that Fairfax Media’s websites will need to move back upmarket if they want to attract paying subscribers once their paywalls are introduced
The radical shift by Fairfax Media to a digital-first model must be accompanied by a sharp improvement in the quality of journalism on its websites if the paywall plan is to succeed, media analysts agree.
The country’s oldest media business announced yesterday it would move to a metered-subscription model similar to the one used by The New York Times website, which grants viewers a limited amount of free access before requiring them to pay depending on how much content they view.
The Times has enjoyed early success with the model, which has been in place for more than a year. But the website embraces a more dry approach to news – and a closer relationship to its parent newspaper – than either of the two most popular Fairfax websites, for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
“The radical shift by Fairfax Media to a digital-first model must be accompanied by a sharp improvement in the quality of journalism on its websites if the paywall plan is to succeed, media analysts agree”
Dude, that’s hilarious. So what you’re saying is, they’re doomed. Because they’re going to spend *less* on quality, not more. And with Gina Rinehart on board they are certainly not going to go for the intellectual end of the market. You know, because actual analysis is bad – knee jerk populism and FUD is the model du jour.
Good luck with that.
I disagree that The Age/SMH online has to go either one way (quality journalism) or the other (celeb ‘stories’). Sometimes you need a break from reading the high-brow political editorials; Lara Bingle et al can be a good distraction. Isn’t keeping readership levels up (and growing them) more important than alienating a new generation of readers?
You can still cover “trivial” matters if you have the writers to find the angle and do it with aplomb. How many copies does The Age sell on the strength of its investigations? How many advertisers do they attract? They need to be done, those chin-strokers in-depthers, but if no one reads them because the other ingredients in the mix are wrong, what’s the point?
Re-staff the back bench, hire a few people who can write, go tab,recruit a bunch of cheap kids to cover parts of Melbourne where the Age doesn’t sell anymore, can the polemics and get Gina to cut the cover price to $1.
The Herald Sun would kack itself.
There are still 600,000 newspapers sold every day in Melbourne. If the Age picked up 100,000 on the strength of the shift to tabloid and kept them with better content, it would be a 350,000 vs 250,000 race. But Fairfax has to fix the product.
If i am going to have to pay for it – i certainly wouldnt want to pay for pre roll ads with no off switch and inane stories (ex NYPD Blue script writer punches pooble) riddled with spelling and grammatical errors 🙁