Lionel Barber, then editor of the Financial Times, told a Media Standards Trust event in London in July 2009 that “within the next 12 months, almost all news organisations will be charging for content”, while allowing that how the payment models would work and how much revenue they could generate was still up in the air.
He was the latest senior figure to say so. Rupert Murdoch had raised the prospect in May that News Corporation’s newspaper websites would start charging within a year, and the New York Times was making similar noises. The recession had sharpened a debate that was already running about how to monetise content given away free.
The objection raised here was that all of these predictions answered the wrong question. Announcing that news will be charged for says nothing about who is going to pay. There was clearly a market for business and financial news, with an identifiable and well-defined audience that had a professional reason to subscribe, which is a large part of why the FT could speak with confidence. General news had no equivalent audience anyone had identified.
The forecast turned out to be early rather than wrong, and the question of who pays for general news has been answered unevenly ever since.