The Sunday Mail
Miriam Tose Majome
ONLINE newspaper and magazine publishers have found that operating in cyberspace comes with challenges that are more complicated than those faced by their counterparts who are into hard copy news.
To survive and thrive in cyberspace, they have to adopt strategies that make them relevant to their ever-changing and dwindling audiences, who are increasingly being drawn to fast-emerging alternative news sources.
Newspapers and broadcasters no longer have monopoly in disseminating news and information because of the emergence of the internet and social media platforms that have better capacity to deliver breaking news in real-time. Future generations will find it amusing and unbelievable that people once had to wait until the next day to read the latest news.
We can only wait to gauge the feasibility of strategies being adopted by Zimbabwean publications in their quest to stay alive and relevant in the Digital Age.
The Daily News and Financial Gazette are two local publications that have introduced paywalls on their websites as a way of selling their products on the internet.
A paywall is an online application that blocks free news content, meaning readers can only access news after paying the publisher.
The peculiar feature of the paywalls being adopted by local newspapers is that readers are required to pay to read individual stories, as opposed to buying the entire publication at one go.
The question those experimenting with paywalls need to answer is how much the Zimbabwean market is prepared to pay for news, which they can read or get for free elsewhere.
However, the silver lining is that online news is not restricted to the local market, so readers from other parts of the world are also potential customers.
The use of paywalls has not been as successful as anticipated worldwide.
The Sun, one of the United Kingdom’s most popular newspapers, introduced a paywall in 2013.
At that time, the paper had a readership of 30 million people.
The publishers believed these readers presented a huge market. However, the strategy backfired spectacularly.
Instead of making money, the paper lost a lot of revenue and a disturbingly high number of subscribers.
Readership fell from 30 million to just 117 000 shortly after the introduction of the paywall.
They simply did not like the paywall.
So, The Sun scrapped the paywall after just two years and allowed free public access to content again.
The Guardian newspaper, another one of the UK’s most popular papers, operates at a loss but has never adopted a paywall.
Like most traditional newspapers, its main source of revenue was from advertisers. That was until advertisers realised placement of newspaper adverts online did not work very well. Advertisements by local companies in online newspapers do not reach the intended local markets.
For example, The Guardian has eight million subscribers. However, about six million of them are not in the UK. So, advertising UK products to them was akin to wasting resources.
Paywalls are also despised because they are considered undemocratic and elitist. Important news is restricted to only those people who can afford to pay, and this goes against facilitating the free flow of information. It keeps important public information in the hands of a few people, giving them power to exploit it for their gain.
Paywalls also come with the risk of the proliferation of “designer news”.
This is where news and opinions are either manufactured or tampered with to appease paying customers — telling people what they want to hear, instead of what is true. This puts paid to the concept of free and credible media.
Paywalls are not a viable business model because readers cannot be relied on to pay for news when there are many other alternative sources of free content.
The news content on sale has to be so important to readers or so unique that readers are willing to pay for it.
Nobody in their right mind pays for news and information which they can easily get for free.
A Canadian study revealed that paywalls generate only 10 percent of publishers’ revenue. Even the habit of printing only part of a story and then redirecting readers to finish reading it online cannot possibly work well because it is irritating. All these are understandable survival strategies occasioned by a treacherous news market. Whichever strategy publishers opt to take, they are clearly between a rock and a hard place.
Miriam Tose Majome is a commissioner with the Zimbabwe Media Commission.
