Too crucial to fail
Jinfo Blog

22nd May 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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More evidence – if more were needed – that the days of free quality business news are numbered comes from a survey conducted by accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers and reported by the European Journalism Centre (http://digbig.com/4yssd). PwC’s poll of 4,900 respondents in the United States and Europe found that consumers would be willing to pay 97% of the purchase price of a traditional newspaper for online business content, provided there were no free online products of equal quality on the market. NewsCorp’s patriarch Rupert Murdoch, who has already growled that dependence on free content is ‘going to have to change’ (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e18103) has now set up a global team to create a system for charging for his company’s online offerings. Media commentator paidContent speculates (http://digbig.com/4ysse) that this might be a difficult call for general news (although an e-reader could be the answer) – but there seems little argument that charging for value-added business-to-business content is feasible. In fact, NewsCorp subsidiary Dow Jones Newswires is currently putting this principle into practice by hiring a columnist (http://digbig.com/4yssf) to write ‘for a new product combining targeted news, analysis and commentary with innovative tools for investment bankers around the world’. Comfort with Excel spreadsheets is one requirement of the job – not surprising bearing in mind that one of the analyst’s key tools is likely to be Dow Jones’s new Economic Sentiment Indicator (http://digbig.com/4yssh), which is designed to predict the health of the US economy by analysing the coverage of 15 major daily American newspapers. In a recent interview with paidContent:UK (http://digbig.com/4yssg), FT.com’s editor Rob Grimshaw pointed out that the FT is in a niche business, where quality and uniqueness makes it relatively straightforward to have a subscription model. Churning out reproductions of newswire content, barely rewritten, isn’t an option, he adds: ‘Consumers aren’t stupid – if they feel they can get exactly the same somewhere else, they are going to do that.’ And there’s the nub: as the PwC survey indicates, for the niche subscription model to work, there has to be no available free product of equal quality. So finding the trustworthy free stuff – quickly and cost-effectively – seems a sensible first priority for information professionals (more on this at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e4840). After that, infopros need to play an active role in specifying and commissioning precisely the kind of quality commentary and analysis that they still need and are prepared to pay for. That means forging a close relationship with their business-to-business media. The current turmoil in the B2B market is if anything even greater than that facing the mainstream business media, and infopros can’t afford to see it fail (see for example http://www.vivavip.com/go/e16896). B2B is so crucial that we’ll look at it separately in a future LiveWire posting.

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