Paul Bradshaw pointed to a study by the American Press Institute, published as a PDF, on what newspaper executives believed about digital content and how far that matched their readers.
The gap was the finding. Three-quarters of executives thought readers would go back to the print product if they could no longer get the newspaper’s journalism online. Only 30 per cent of readers said they would. Most said that if their local newspaper website disappeared they would get local news from other websites and from television — not from the paper.
This mattered because of what the executives were planning. Nearly 60 per cent were considering charging for news, and a quarter expected to start within six months, on an assumption about reader behaviour that their own readers did not share.
The study’s recommendation was blunt about what would and would not sell: paid content has to go well beyond repurposed print content and old models, audiences are most likely to pay for unique content not available elsewhere for free, and fully paid blocks of repurposed local newspaper content had not proved a significant revenue source for the news websites that tried it.
The argument made here followed from that. A newsroom or boardroom does not set the value of news and information; the audience does, and any decision to charge has to be taken from the audience’s side of the transaction.