Freelance Unbound

…largely in the comments section to my post a couple of days ago, oddly enough.
Soilman points me to an interesting article in the Telegraph about Swedish peer-to-peer site The Pirate Bay and the general unwillingness of consumers to pay for content these days.
Here’s what the Telegraph thinks:

Why won’t consumers pay for content? The answer is very simple. Consumers have been so spoilt by free content over the last fifteen years that they now take it for granted that content should be free.

Uh, yes. Those selfish, thoughtless consumers.
Well, actually – in more specific economic terms – the cost of publication and the barriers to entry are so low that there is a vast supply of content. And that means consumers are just shopping in a media mall where everything is at bargain basement, loss-leader prices. Of zero, mostly. 
Attempts to choke off that supply and so create artificial scarcity – a bit like De Beers and the diamond trade – are doomed to failure because there’s just so much stuff out there to read. 
And I loved this bit:

At a certain moment in the not too distant future, consumers will finally have to acknowledge their own guilt in the destruction of our paid culture. 

Yeah. Sure. That‘ll happen…

…in a nutshell. 
This goes some way to explaining why I was reading headlines like this about swine flu a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m reading headlines like this about swine flu medication…

Here’s a nice piece from Scooping The News that outlines clearly why they think charging for online news content is a bit of a non-starter.
It covers the main bases:

• The supply of web content is now vast
• Charging hasn’t worked for anyone else yet.
• Newspapers don’t have compelling enough content to compete
• There will always be free competition

And as Rupert Murdoch has noticed – the main free competitor in the English-speaking world will be the BBC. In the face of such asymmetric competition, I wonder if anyone can make a go of charging for content online.
More on the position of the BBC in all this to come…

Even casual readers of Freelance Unbound will know I’m pretty sceptical that the news media will find it easy to make a go of charging for online access to plain old news. But, you know, I could be wrong.
A case in point is the Boston Globe, which has announced it will definitely, absolutely, start doing this soon.
Although, according to the report from Editor and Publisher:

Neither the specifics of the plan nor a potential date to begin charging have been officially announced.

Hmm. Well, we’ll wait and see I guess.
Don’t get me wrong – I’d be delighted for the Globe if the plan works. And it seems from the noises being made by publishers that newspapers with their back against the wall see no other option. So we may well see this experiment happening.
And maybe once some papers take the plunge, others will rush to copy them. Although this flies in the face of most commercial experience, which will normally see companies sitting back to watch as higher prices kill off a competitor rather than happily joining in with the strategy.
[HT: Annette Novak]

There’s a good piece on PaidContent.org about Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge for News International’s web content. Part of this will be to charge for access to The Sun and the News of the World online.
How will he manage to do this?

“Just make our content better and differentiate it from other people. And I believe if we’re successful, we will be followed by all the media.”

Well, maybe. Anyone familiar with this blog knows I’m sceptical about the ability of general news media to charge for content to the extent that they need to. Sure, they may make some money from subscriptions online, but enough to fund an entire news operation? And enough to make up for the decline in advertising revenue that will come from having a much smaller readership?

As others have suggested, the real commercial model for media will probably come from added value services (maybe apps, maybe something else). I suspect the old menu of news and, increasingly, entertainment is just not different enough from the free alternatives.

And before anyone starts banging on about how the free stuff is no good, look at how many people happily read the crappy free newspapers on the train rather than buying a “quality” paper. People don’t see it as a problem for the most part.

But Murdoch himself acknowledges the key problem:

“Frankly, the big free competition will be coming from the BBC.”

Perhaps the solution is to force the BBC to put up a pay wall at the same time. That way we’ll see if users can be tempted to pay for news content when there’s no decent free alternative…

[HT: Jessica]

…as it seems that the Dutch, like everyone else in the developed world, can read a free copy of the Metro on their daily commute.
The main difference? Fewer girls in bikinis…

I’m off to glamorous Rotterdam this week to do some stop frame animation with my good friend Arnold. He’s very talented (much more so than me), though obviously as he’s Dutch he’s a bit bonkers. Evidence of this can be found in his showreel here.
As a result, journalism and digital media are probably not going to be central to this week’s posting. Instead, I’m going to be focusing on puppets and Plasticine.
I’m also taking the opportunity to break out the animation theme from Freelance Unbound and give it a home of its very own in the sister Stop.Frame animation blog. There’ll be a cross-link at the top of the page to each from now on.
So that’ll be two blogs I have to worry about keeping up. Still, it’s not as if I have anything else to occupy my time with.
And if I see any fascinating snippets from the Dutch media I’ll be sure to share them with you here…

Apparently, social networking sites prevent teenagers from developing rounded relationships, makes them treat friendship as a commodity and helps drive them to suicide.
It seems that Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols is not a big fan of SMS and email, either.

Friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it’s right.

Well, yes. But I suspect this little outburst confuses symptom with cause. Any examination of the teenage high school experience (albeit perhaps mediated by Hollywood) reveals that teenagers often treat friendship as a commodity. Facebook and SMS just help them refine this a little.
Should we be worried? Well, as I’ve found, teenagers can be a bit obsessive about keeping up with their Facebook wall, but on the whole I’m not going to panic about it. After all, what are they going to be doing if they’re not sitting at home damaging themselves with excessive virtual community membership? Sitting in big gangs in the park drinking cider and getting into fights? Well – at least that’s real physical interaction.
It all reminds me a bit of the Seduction of the Innocent panic in the US in the 1950s – the adult world got into a lather about kids reading violent comics and scapegoated them, with mass comic book burnings and Senate sub-committee hearings.
Nowadays the sight of kids reading comic books is more likely to evoke feelings of nostalgia than a fear of social collapse. And in a few decades no doubt the same will be true for video games – another contemporary adult bête noir.
Meanwhile, let’s have a look at that dysfunctional teenage experience, with not a laptop in sight…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpg9xmsYgWU

Back in 1940, people would stop outside the local newspaper office to read the headlines posted in the window. Well, there was no rolling TV news or internet…

Image from the ever-browsable Shorpy (motto: “Always Something Interesting”).

As I’m drowning in web taxonomy at the moment, let’s take time out to enjoy last weekend’s English Heritage Festival of History.
I joined 1,000 happy historic re-enacters in a field in Northamptonshire to watch a mini re-enactment of D-Day, be shown how a Sten gun worked and enjoy all the grisly details of Tudor-style judicial punishment – including hanging, drawing and, naturally, quartering. Oh, and some nice people enjoying some tea and cake.
Next year I’m planning to form a Journalism Re-Enactment Society, and set up an old-style print newsroom in the field, complete with copy editors, picture researchers and typesetters – and some grouchy bloke wearing a green eye-shade. 
Anyone interested, contact me through the blog. Seriously – I might even do this…