After a recent house move, I decided there was far too much paper in my life. At a rough estimate, paper accounted for almost a third of the weight shifted between houses.

There are more details in Cutting down the paper mountain. I don’t think a 100 percent paperless office is possible or desirable, but reducing my paper use by 90 percent is plausible and recycling the bulk of my existing paper records is a reasonable goal. I call it paper-lite.

My career – I’ve been a journalist for 30 years – is part of the problem. I had many boxes full of my newspaper cuttings, magazines I’ve written and edited and other portfolio material. It runs to many filing cabinets.

I’ve also been writing material for online distribution since the late 1980s – remember Apple’s eWorld, Compuserve and Bix?

A journalist’s portfolio is an important work record. It’s invaluable when it comes to finding new work – particularly as I’m now a freelance for half the week.

The portfolio also has a wealth of useful information, story ideas and memory joggers.

I’ve been systematically scanning and storing my old clippings. Reducing the inevitable duplication that turns up in  this kind of collection and generally tidying up. The scanning process is slow – I expect it to take many more months yet.

One lesson I learnt early on is to not be over fussy about scan quality. It needs to be neat and tidy, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Another lesson I’ve learnt is to store scanned material as PDFs. They are more compact and easier to use than TIFF or other file formats.

Perhaps the hardest aspect of converting my portfolio to a digital format is sharing it with others. I can mail prospective clients examples of stories, but having material for casual browsers is difficult because my web host charges by the MB for storage and I’m only allowed so much traffic a month. Big PDFs quickly chew through my quota.

As an experiment, I’m storing some portfolio PDFs in a public folder on my Microsoft SkyDrive. As an example, here’s a piece I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald’s The Sydney Magazine in October 2004.

I’d be interested to hear of ways other journalists are storing their portfolios.

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In the last hour I checked the size of the front page of six news web sites using http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com. Here are the results:

• Fairfax’s Stuff – 1.7MB
• The New Zealand Herald – 450Kb
• The Sydney Morning Herald – 940Kb
• The Australian – 874Kb
• Radio New Zealand News – 88Kb
• ABC News Radio – 294Kb

So you can read the Radio New Zealand News page 200 times and still download less data than a single read of Stuff.

While these numbers may not be important if you’ve got a nifty broadband link and an unlimited download plan, they make a huge difference when you are on the end of a slow link or paying through the nose for each megabyte of data.

None of the sites attempted to show one of those awful TV style advertisements during this test. I hate to think what they might add to the totals.

Update: The National Business Review weighs in at 398Kb.

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Despite the global financial meltdown and widespread lay-offs, Australia still faces serious skills shortages. The obvious answer is to drag in workers with the right qualifications and experience from overseas.

It’s not hard to attract skilled people to Australia; from many places overseas it can almost look like a Shangri-la. However, the bureaucratic hoops are daunting and, technology skills requirements are a fast moving target so in many cases, by the time applications are processed, employers demands have changed. Read the rest of this entry »

Not only did Australia’s two main print news media organisations reject Amazon’s Kindle book reader, both made their rejection public. Fairfax went overboard, publishing versions of the story in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and on its youth-focused site, The Vine. However, it didn’t run in The Australian Financial Review.

News Corporation has been less vocal, although Rupert Murdoch did mention his dissatisfaction with the reader in comments following his company’s annual results.

As this story in The Sydney Morning Herald explains, the problem is Amazon wants to clip the ticket by too much. Some reports suggest the company takes as much as 70 percent of the price of ebook sales and is seeking similar highmargins from newspaper subscriptions.

Sony and Apple are mentioned as possible alternatives. One aspect of this story is the assumption people will want to read online newspapers via a special reader rather than with a PC or smartphone.

Kindle Rejected By Australian Newspapers | Fairfax Media, News Corporation.

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The signals coming from Fairfax may be slightly jumbled, but the message is clear. Australia and New Zealand’s largest publisher plans to follow Murdoch and charge for online news.

I describe the signals as confused because on Friday, Stephen Hutcheon at the Sydney Morning Herald wrote a story about readers’ reluctance to pay for online news. On one level Hutcheon’s Not happy, Rupert: readers say they won’t pay for online news was a simple dig at the rival News Corporation – complete with an unflattering photograph of Rupert Murdoch. He says News’ announcement was followed by 140 reader comments – mainly from angry readers threatening to go elsewhere the moment charges are applied.

Clearly Fairfax’s left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing because Sunday saw Tom Hyland write Fairfax, News to charge for online at The Age website. He also wrote the longer Stop the presses. Hyland had the unenviable job of quoting Fairfax chief executive Brian McCarthy who told him; “charging for online access was essential if publishers were to maintain their newsroom staff.”

You always know things are going to get tricky when a newspaper executive uses a word like ‘monetising’ and Hyland quotes McCarthy getting his teeth around that in the very next paragraph. He went on to talk about a two-level model at the The Age and the The Sydney Morning Herald websites.

Of course Fairfax is no stranger to charging for online content. The company’s The Australian Financial Review has long been one of the regions few major titles to eschew the free online model and charge readers. By all accounts the AFR’s paywall hasn’t been very successful, but it will have taught the company some useful lessons about how to turn reader clicks into real money.

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Image by Rowen Atkinson via Flickr

Practical subscription models are possible. Micro-payments need a lot more work and may never be a serious option.

Many traditional newspaper publishers plan to charge for online news and other material. Or maybe it would be more correct to say they hope to charge.

Currently online publishers mainly earn money from advertising. They say, with some justification, this doesn’t generate enough revenue to pay for the teams of journalists and editors who produce online newspapers and magazines. It certainly doesn’t deliver the ‘rivers of gold’ profits they enjoyed back in the heyday of newspaper publishing.

But publishers wishing to switch from an advertising revenue model to a charging model or a mixture of advertising and pay-to-read face an up-hill struggle.

For a start, only a small percentage of existing readers are willing to pay any money. Judging by what I’ve heard from people  in the industry, publishers believe somewhere between one and 10 percent of existing readers would be willing to hand over money.

The precise number depends on many factors including the value of the material being offered. But most publishers who’ve tried this in the past have only managed to sell paid subscriptions to one or two percent of online readers.

How much does a single page cost?

Let’s for arguments sake here agree that 10 percent of an online publication’s existing readers would be prepared to pay for content. Remember this number is higher than anyone appears to achieved to date.

This means in order for the paywall to generate as much money as the current advertising model each paying reader will have to contribute as much revenue as ten existing readers.

Online advertising is generally charged by the CPM (cost per thousand). Typically publishers can earn somewhere in the region of $50 for every thousand page views (I’m using indicative numbers and not precise numbers). This is 5 cents per page view. Then to make the same money a single online page would cost 50 cents to read.

If publishers can only convert 2 percent of existing free readers into paying readers the single page price would rise to $2.50 – which is close to the A$3.50 The Australian Financial Review charges for each story.

Charging by the page for online newspapers

While billing users by the page to view online content may look attractive to publishers, it’s not a cost free transaction. The price of delivering a single web page to a browser is so small it is in effect negligible. The cost of adding a per page billing system to a site with ecommerce gateways, security and the paywall technology is slightly higher – though still small compared with the $2.50 fee calculated above.

However, that fee would only replace online advertising revenue. As Rupert Murdoch says, the existing revenue isn’t enough to pay the bills, let alone make a profit. On this basis the cost charged per page would need to rise to at least $3.00, but let’s say for the sake of argument Murdoch needs to make $3.50 per sold online page to cover costs and keep his shareholders happy.

The micro-payment price is just plain wrong

There’s something very wrong with charging readers US$3.50 to read a single online story, or for that matter the A$3.50 charged by the Australian Financial Review. It only costs $3.00 to by a print edition of the newspaper, containing somewhere in the region of 64 tabloid pages. The physical newpaper has been written and edited by a large team, printed on dead trees, wrapped up and distributed across an entire continent to arrive at a local newsagent, who takes a 30 percent or so slice of the cover price. It has at least 100 stories – usually plenty of really good reading – and vast amounts of valuable information. All for 50 cents less than the cost of a single online page that cost the AFR’s publisher nothing to deliver to your screen.

Not only that, but the printed paper is your property for as long as you want. It’s hard saving or downloading the AFR’s online content – though you can print it out at your own cost – probably another 10 cents or so on top of the $3.50 you’ve already paid.

Similar logic applies to any other newspaper sold piecemeal online – it’s not really a sensible purchase. There are times when it makes sense to pay for the occasional story, but over the long haul it is much cheaper to buy the print edition. In fact a subscription to the print edition is 20 percent cheaper than buying the paper each day directly from a newsagent, which makes purchasing stories online relatively more expensive.

What about digital subscriptions?

If buying online stories piecemeal doesn’t make sense, what about digital subscriptions? The model closest to home for me is The Australian Financial Review which charges A$75 a month for access to the digital edition only – that’s the same price as a subscription to the print edition. Which from a reader point of view makes far more sense, but doesn’t pass on any of the savings involved in not printing or distributing the physical paper. Given the costs involved, the margins on this would be huge – which may cause resentment from readers, though probably not the well-heeled types who buy the AFR. But it’s important to recognise the Financial Review covers a specialist niche and its readers can afford to pay a premium online – though by all accounts not many do. It would be much harder for a general newspaper to charge this kind of price.

It’s pretty clear after looking at the numbers that publishers are going to follow the subscription model for online content sales and not micro-payments and selling stories one-by-one. Maybe it’ll work for Murdoch, after all, this is the man who convinced half the western world to pay for television – something that had previously been free. Yet there are other complications. As The Sydney Morning Herald points out Murdoch’s claims that readers would be willing to pay for ‘quality journalism’ is, well, something of a talking point.

Also, there are are major privacy concerns about Murdoch’s plans. As Wendy Davis explains at MediaPost, Murdoch wants to collect reader data – that’s not a move to endear yourself to customers when you’re about to hit them up with new charges.

As I’ve said before, as a journalist and editor, I’ve a vested interest in publishers finding ways to make readers pay for editorial. Unlike many I’m not in principle against the idea, I’m just don’t think it can work without major disruption and top-to-bottom reform of the entire publishing industry. Only a fool would dismiss Murdoch, he knows the media business inside out, but this could yet turn out to be News Corporation’s Vietnam.  We’ll know soon enough.

Today The Australian’s Media section ran Readers not averse to paying for online content by Nick Tabakoff. As the headline suggests the story looks at an international study by PricewaterhouseCoopers which found ‘readers could be willing to pay almost as much for some high-quality online newspapers as they do for print versions, particularly in specialist news areas’.

Could this be related to the PricewaterhouseCoopers study referred to by Miriam Steffens in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Readers reluctant to pay for online news?

Indeed it is.

Now, strictly speaking there’s a fairly thin semantic line between ‘readers being reluctant to pay’ and ‘readers not adverse to paying for’. One does not directly contradict the other. But the two headlines are clearly two different interpretations of the same data.

Or as we say in the media, they each have a different spin.

Which one is more plausible?

Both Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the owner of The Australian and Fairfax Media, owner of the SMH have a vested interest in the story.

Murdoch has gone on the record in recent days saying he wants to charge readers for online content on News Corporation web sites. The headline on Nick Tabakoff’s story squares nicely with Murdoch’s recent statements on the issue. We all know Murdoch interferes editorially in his papers. While it’s extremely unlikely he had a hand in this particularly story, it does reflect the official line now coming from News Corporation.

Fairfax is more complicated. The company’s The Australian Financial Review operates behind a content pay wall. It costs around $3 a pop to view an AFR story, though most paying customers have all-you-can-eat subscriptions. On the other hand the SMH, The Age and the company’s other online properties including New Zealand’s stuff.co.nz are all free to readers and make money from online advertising.

Now which story looks the most plausible?

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Rupert Murdoch says News Corporation will start charging for access to its news websites within a year. The Guardian quotes him saying this will fix what he describes as a ‘malfunctioning business model’.

Unless he has something clever up his sleeve, I think his words are just wishful thinking. Going by this Reuters report, News Corporation plans  to charge ‘micro-payments’.

He has a point

Murdoch is right when he says the business model for online news is broken.

Newsgathering and production is expensive to do properly. It requires far more than the pittance that can be earned from Google Ads.

Newspaper publishers historically made their money from two revenue streams: copy sales and advertising. When I first worked as a journalist in the UK in the early 1980s, copy sales made up the bulk of a daily paper’s revenue.

Advertising was just the cream on top.

Elsewhere, advertising is the bulk of a paper’s revenue. Kerry Packer famously once described the advertising going into Fairfax’s Australian metropolitan newspapers as ‘rivers of gold’. New Zealand newspapers have also done proportionately better out of advertising than copy sales.

Of course free newspapers only earn money from advertising. But, in general and with a few exceptions, their editorial is embarrassingly awful.

Print advertising revenue is dropping fast as advertisers move online. This is particularly true for the small advertisers who once paid for classified ads. Those dollars now go to web businesses like eBay, Google and, in New Zealand, Trade Me.

It won’t work for mass audiences

People might just pay for financial or other specialist information if it’s important to them and they can’t get it for free elsewhere. Otherwise, readers simply aren’t prepared to pay for content. And they certainly won’t do so if they don’t have to. The Sydney Morning Herald reports a survey saying what everyone working in the business knew already: Readers reluctant to pay for online news.

Previous attempts to charge have failed. When one paper charges and a rival doesn’t, the free site gets pretty much all the business. In the past publishers who attempted to run paid news sites either wised up or filed for bankruptcy.

Murdoch owns a lot of papers around the world. If they all impose a charging model at the same time they might just attract some paying customers. I doubt they will attract enough. The Murdoch papers certainly aren’t noticeably better editorially than their rivals.

I can’t see how this will work. Murdoch may be able to cut deals with phone companies and ISPs to deliver News Corporation content to customers behind certain content walls, but I don’t see consumers paying more than a few pennies per month for those kinds of services. There may be a electronic news reading device — perhaps it works on a subscription model. It would have to be good, simple-to-use and  inexpensive.

The paid content genie is well and truly out of the bottle. Not even Rupert Murdoch can put it back again.

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