One way newspaper paywalls could work: Sport

Sport could be the secret weapon in the newspaper industry’s campaign to get general readers to pay for online content.

Like business news, sport is a niche where people have already been trained to expect to pay for specialist coverage.

It has already worked for television. Here in New Zealand there is almost no live sport on free to air television other than international netball. Rugby, cricket, rugby league, soccer, golf and tennis are only shown live on pay TV.

In other words, if Kiwis wants to watch TV sport, they have to pay – and it isn’t cheap.

People seem more willing to pay a premium to watch sport on TV more than other forms of entertainment. That’s partly because of the nature of the beast – a game with an unknown result is exciting. Watching it the next day, or a few hours later, when the score is known just isn’t the same.

Now, newspapers can’t compete directly with TV when it comes to capturing that drama, but I suspect people would still be prepared to pay to have access to first class analysis, high quality games stats and live blog or Twitter style coverage of key matches. An example of how this can work is the way the BBC runs live, online ball-by-ball coverage of cricket test matches. Until it was acquired by ESPN, the Cricnfo site ran similar coverage and managed to sell a number of value-added extras to subscribers.

It wouldn’t be too hard to stick sports journalism behind an online pay wall.

Sports writing operates along slightly different lines to other types of journalism. Sports codes and the big clubs jealously guard access to personalities for interviews, photos and other matters. Publications who don’t, er, play ball, often find themselves on the outer. Some types of coverage are simply not welcomed and sports often exert some forms of control over coverage. It wouldn’t be hard for a sports governing body to license exclusive coverage to one or more newspaper group – clubs could do the same. In fact, News Corporation already has interests in a number of sporting codes and clubs.

Of course, there is one major drawback with this idea. There is evidence that moving sport from free-to-air to pay-TV is damaging some games at a grass roots level – sticking online media coverage behind a paywall may only make matters worse. But that’s another issue…