I wouldn’t say SBS or ABC are producing cutting edge stuff (follow the BBC is the motto I think) in fact I would say the offering in Australia overall is of a poor standard when put up against timesonline, guardian or the independent just three papers off the top of my head. If these brands choose to charge people will pay.

The brand it self is prestigious and people rightly or wrongly want to be associated with those brands. How many people do you reckon are quoting this blog saying “oh well it was in the bronwenclune.com” no one. It costs commercial operators a lot of money to keep those brands running and they want those cost covered you can’t blame them for that.

You also forget to mention that SBS, ABC and BBC are government owed so have a lot of restrictions on what they can and can’t publish and also how it is published.

Paying for content will happen, a matter of when not if. It will have a huge effect on the Australian market as people look for value in their subscriptions so Fairfax and News Ltd will need to lift their game as the market switches from local to international.

Expect the ABC to do what they do best local news and SBS will niche in with their minority news and minority sport. Fairfax and Murdoch will carve up the rest.

As for bloggers like yourself you just don’t have the reach to compete in fact I would say you will go backwards. After all, who are you?

Steve: ”Journalism will live in a micro format with niche content which people will pay for directly”
If this was true, then gradually those niches would be gathered together under a big media umbrella, and we’d be back where we started. What would be missing? Political coverage? Police and emergency services? Transport? Social affairs? Will all these niches add up to a society that’s as well informed as this one, or less so?

Journalism will live in a micro format with niche content which people will pay for directly or via specific tailored advertising.

Good night big media, I hope you enjoyed your stay.

Love Stevie.

No Nick, that’s not it at all. Rather, it is this: if you’re going to expect people to pay for your product, it has to be better than the average. It’s all about value perception. AFR gets away (presumably) with charging for their content because readers perceive it as of higher value than the rest.

Seems to me these days mostly what you pay for in print media is opinion – Reuters, and AAP do all the journalism, everyone else embellishes that. I suspect the result is will be that people will only pay for the opinion they agree with, or value. For example, you’d have more luck paying me to read Andrew Bolt than expecting me to pay to read him.

As for James Murdoch winging about the BBC, my heart bleeds for you mate!

Right, that sounds like the perfect solution???

Quality journalism is still out there if you look for it, and teh vast majority of it is done by salaried journalists.

Someone’s got to pay those salaries, else that journalism will go away. Smart journos can always find better jobs – most often they jump the fence to the burgeoning ranks of ‘consultancy’ or private and public sector PR, dedicated to manipulating the non-quality media in order to get biased messages into the public sphere.

Quality written journalism was paid for by classified ads,display ads and the cover price.

The cover price didn’t even cover the cost of the dead trees it was printed on, let alone the factory producing it and the army of trucks and newsagents distributing it. So theoretically we should be better off online.

But classifieds have divorced themselves from journalism online, and display ads are diluted by the vast array of other forms of online content they can attach themselves to.

A pay wall is a way of making up the difference. If it doesn’t work (and I admit, it doesn’t look likely), and we can’t find any other revenue model, we will end up with the ABC and SBS as the only quality news producers.

From the outside, that might not sound like a bad thing. But from the inside, I can tell you it means you will get a small fraction of the amount of quality news that you currently get. You cannot cut the number of professional journalists by nine-tenths (or more) and not get a big hit in quality and quantity.

SBS might be happy… until they realise how much harder a full news report is without print media leading the way (and, incidentally, helping pay for the wire services that provide much of the international news feed).

So the theme of your piece is sort of wrong. Pay walls may not be the answer. But if the alternative is the death of major news organisations that produce quality content, then that is most definitely BAD news for journalism.

I’ll pay for news the day that a newspaper editor throws his or her hands in the air and says that there’s no newspaper today because there’s nothing newsworthy.