I just saw this post on Jon Slattery’s blog about the “Guardian Club”, and immediately thought “hardly anyone’s going to join that.”
That was my immediate reaction, and it wasn’t really about the “club” at all. Instead, it was my ‘eureka’ moment about paying for news. Or rather, not paying for “general” news.
I read almost all of my news via RSS in a feed reader. My “News” folder now consists mostly of Financial Times RSS feeds (split by geographic region). There’s also the Guardian’s UK news feed, among others from different sites. ((The Morning Star, Asia Times, and GlobalPost, at the moment.))
Until recently, I also subscribed to the Guardian’s world news feed. I realised that for the previous few weeks, I hadn’t actually read any of the stories. They were marked unread, sure, but most of the time I’d read the FT’s article first, or the FT’s article was far superior.
So I ditched it. I suspect the UK feed won’t be around for long either.
I have free access to both sites, ((I have a free student subscription to the FT.)) so they were competing for my attention on quality alone. The Guardian lost.
The Guardian may or may not decide to charge for this material. If they do, they will have to work incredibly hard to justify it when better quality copy is available elsewhere for a (probably) similar price.
But even if they don’t charge, and it remains free, I’ll be reaching for my debit card when the FT asks for it.
In either scenario, the Guardian loses.
(If you’re missing the point here, it’s that quality matters. ‘Ordinary’ newspapers can’t just charge for currently-free content when it’s not the best product for the money, or there isn’t some other strong incentive (and I’ve yet to hear of any credible incentives to offer for paying readers).)
