Following today’s annoucement that the News International paywall will be going ahead this summer – with online users being charged £1 a day or £2 for a weeks access to both The Times and The Sunday Times, and Alexander Lebedev’s purchase of The Independent yesterday – the future of news remains uncertain. Will all online publications resort to the paywall? What will the implications be for those publications that don’t follow suit? Will the newspaper give way to the web? Or, do we have nothing to worry about?
Attempting to decipher the future of news were Intelligence Squared’s panel – Andrew Neil, A.A. Gill, Turi Munthe, Claire Enders, David Elstein, Matthew Parris and Jacob Weisberg – representing the broad spectrum of views between print and online.
To say the views were divergent would be an understatement – the growth of citizen journalism received both celebration and condemnation from the panel, with A.A. Gill claiming it dilutes the ‘profession’ of journalism and Jacob Weisberg praising it for it’s immediacy; the ‘free content’ model was an equally hot topic, with Matthew Parris comparing it to a zeplin which will sink, while the future of the news in it’s current print carnation roused the opinions of Andrew Neil, Claire Enders and David Elstein.
With 80% of news online coming from aggregators rather than original sources – and with our newspapers full of ‘over paid columnists’ (Andrew Neil) yet without the finances to fund proper Watergate era journalism anymore (case in point WMD) it’s clear that something has to change, the question remains though, what?
While the future of news may remain murky, the audience were over optimistic, voting that they believed the internet would only serve to enhance ‘quality news’ – offering a vital critique of both our politicans and our media.
