Paywall rises

Rupert Murdoch’s dropped his other shoe.

After months of ranting about how the internet’s been stealing his lunch, come June his Times and Sunday Times newspapers will be the first of News Corp’s big print engines (other than the Wall Street Journal) to closet their Web products behind a paywall. The price of one day’s admission will reportedly be the cover price of a weekday print edition; a week’s access will be 2 pounds ($2.98).

News International CEO Rebekah Brooks said Murdoch’s other UK newspapers — The Sun and News of the World — would also charge readers, and Murdoch’s promised the same for his American newspapers (including the New York Post), although no specifics have been announced.

I suppose we can wait until June to see how this plays out across the pond, but meanwhile we’ve got lots of commentary to consider.

We’ll start with Brooks’ Times announcement, in which she said:

At a defining moment for journalism, this is a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition. We are proud of our journalism and unashamed to say that we believe it has value.

The most incendiary reaction so far is from hyperlocal internet sage Jeff Jarvis, who savaged Murdoch in his Guaradian column.

Jarvis, who used to work for Murdoch at TV Guide, says, “I respected his balls. It is a pity to see them gone.”

Jarvis sizzles with disappointment — anger — over what’s about to happen at News Corp:

Rupert Murdoch has declared surrender. The future defeated him.

By building his paywall around Times Newspapers, he has said that he has no new ideas to build advertising. He has no new ideas to build deeper and more valuable relationships with readers and will send them away if they do not pay. Even he has no new ideas to find the efficiencies the internet can bring in content creation, marketing, and delivery.

Instead, Murdoch will milk his cash cow a pound at a time, leaving his children with a dry, dead beast, the remains of his once proud if not great newspaper empire.

Ouch!

But isn’t there at least a possibility that people will pay? After all, most people (admittedly fewer every day) do pay for a print product? Says Jarvis:

Just because people used to pay in print they should pay now — when the half-life of a scoop’s value is a click, when good-enough news that’s free is also a click away, when the new newsstand of Google and Twitter demands that you stay in the open, searchable and linkable?

This argument I hear about paywalls comes from emotional entitlement (readers “should” pay – when did you ever see a business plan built on the verb “should”?), not hard economics.

Support for Murdoch’s plan appears in today Sun, in a column by BBC broadcaster John Humphrys in which Humphrys declares:

Good journalism has to be paid for, just as we have to pay for the plumber who fixes a leak, or it will not survive.

And let’s be clear: We have the best papers in the world. Full stop.

I want to keep it that way…

The cornerstone of democracy is a well-informed public engaged in passionate debate.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of America’s Declaration of Independence, said: “If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”

That was right two centuries ago and it’s right today.

And we must not put the papers at risk by thinking we do not have to pay for them.

Go to the Guardian site to read the rest of Jarvis’ column, along with some of the 179 comments posted as of noon on Sunday. For more from Jarvis, go to his Buzz Machine blog.

Click here for a view supporting Murdoch’s approach, by former Australian IT editor Ian Grayson who writes: “The likes of Jarvis could not be more wrong.”

See how one of Murdoch’s smaller newspapers — the weekly Brooklyn Paper (video) — is approaching the possibility of paywall erection.

And click for a Patrick Blower “live draw” cartoon.

To out of touch NY Times editors, New York City’s soul revolves around underworked streetwalkers

On Monday, Rupert Murdoch made it clear that he thinks the NY Times is detached from its city. Most everyday, Times readers can detect some of that detachment.

In today’s Times, as a follow-up to yesterday’s front page account on the Federal Superfunding of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal area, the Times attempts to reflect — slowly and with too many words and too few facts — on changes around the Gowanus.

I know this area well, having published The Brooklyn Paper there for 30 years. The canal is sandwiched between upscale neighborhoods; what “grit” remains was destined to be overrun soon by development. Just as the nearby neighborhoods were “gentrified” over the last 30 years, the canal zone would fall to the capitalists’ tools.

Only the canal’s toxicity and last year’s real estate collapse put those plans on hold. The Gowanus neighborhood shrank so fast (squeezed by the expansion of its richer neighbors) that, if you excluded two public housing projects, there wasn’t much left of it as a distinct area. Plans for a Whole Foods supermarket one block east of the canal would have sealed the deal on that end; on the west bank, a major developer’s plans for housing was moving forward.

So, with squalor constrained and everyone long ago on notice that the neighborhood was changing, who did Times reporter Kareem Fahim find to give the area its face today? A street hooker who bemoans the fact that her streets just aren’t the same anymore, that her customers have moved away.

Here’s Fahim’s lead:

The rain had stopped; the streets were empty. A block from the Gowanus Canal, a woman called Terri squinted into the headlights of passing cars, searched for clients and found none.

Her head was wrapped in a powder-blue scarf. The white towers of the Wyckoff Houses rose behind her. She had worked these streets in Brooklyn for years, as the neighborhood turned from a rusty industrial hub into a budding art colony, and lately, a draw for developers dreaming of condominiums.

For Terri, little good had come of all that change. “The people moving in here don’t patronize us,” she said, and got back to work, a half hour before midnight.

Do Fahim’s editors think that the crime-ridden, street-hooking Gowanus of yesteryear is preferable to what’s there today, and that instead of cleaning the canal officials should work to create a favorable work environment (financially, if not environmentally and for safety’s sake) for its prostitutes and thugs?

Local readers of the Times already know that the Gowanus has changed; streetwalkers may still work its dark corners, flagging down drive-through tricks, but they are not a part of their ‘hood anymore.

Here’s some unsolicited advice to the Times — and also to those who are organizing the Journal’s New York desk:

Hire editors who know the streets of New York and the people of New York, who are not afraid to work, and who will think and speak [excuse the coming cliche] out of the box.

Someone like the current editor at my old newspaper, Gersh Kuntzman.

Disclosure: Kuntzman did not ask for and was not advised of this endorsement. His newspaper (The Brooklyn Paper) is owned by NewsCorp’s Community Newspaper Group, a sister of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, to whom I sold The Brooklyn Paper last year. I’m extremely proud of the work he’s done there both under my ownership and under that of the Community Newspaper Group, and I would empathize with my colleagues at The Brooklyn Paper — especially my wife who is The Brooklyn Paper’s publisher — over the loss of Kuntzman were he successfully recruited. I realize, however, that with the Times is in its death throes and the with Journal determined to secure a future for the news business, there’s a lot is riding on the coming fight in New York. Both sides should choose their weapons well.

—Ed Weintrob

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ADDENDUM: The Brooklyn Paper made hay yesterday — over the fact that its Website beat the Times in breaking the Federal Superfund story, and over the fact that the Times accompanied its [late] story with the photo of the wrong Brooklyn waterway (the Times pictured Newtown Creek instead of the Gowanus Canal). The Brooklyn Paper’s headline: “Hey, NY Times — get our filthy canals right!”

The canal photo that accompanies this post is, in fact, of the Gowanus Canal, and is from The Brooklyn Paper, by Kate Emerson.

Post was slightly updated at 4:06 pm ET, with references to Newsday’s New York fiasco removed. That’s a whole ‘nother story, for another day.

Whatcha say? Pay wall or no wall? Brooklyn Paper’s Gersh Kuntzman wants to know.

Rupert Murdoch has taken the lead in promising to erect paywalls around all of his Web properties. That would include such behemoths as the London Times, The Sun, NY Post, FoxNews and such Fox-owned TV stations as Channel 5 in New York.

The wall promises to enclose the small dailies he picked up with the Wall Street Journal, and may also encircle his weekly newspapers in New York City, including the 48,000-circulation Brooklyn Paper which NewsCorp’s Community Newspaper Group acquired (from me) last March.

What do readers of The Brooklyn Paper — a 32-year-old free newspaper — think about the prospect of having to pay to read their free newspaper online?

The Paper’s uninhibited editor, Gersh Kuntzman, asks them in this video.

One reader responded with the suggestion that “I wouldn’t put everything behind the pay wall, but some stories would merit it, like this one: http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/32/4/32_4_gk_nude_angle.html“.

It’s a video of Gersh posing in the nude for a “drink and draw” class in Williamsburg. He’ll do anything for his hipster readers.

— Ed Weintrob