I researched the very current issue in new media of the pay wall being raised on journalism. Specifically looking at reaction to the pay wall and how successful they have been so far. There is a large amount of secondary content discussing The Times’ recent move to use of the pay wall so I based my primary research on finding out British publics opinion of the matter, as well as comparing the offering of The Times online and the print copy. I was able to find out information about both journalistic and public views however as the changes are so recent and News Corp (Murdoch’s corporation which owns papers including The Times, News of the World who are the first to go under a pay wall online) have been very guarded about their somewhat bold move, it was difficult to find conclusive information about the success of the pay wall at the moment.
I began by looking for secondary sources simply using Google and journalism.co.uk in order to find a variety of articles and opinions. I found some very useful information, particularly on beehivecity.com then made my search more specific by looking for articles on the sites of the largest British and some American newspapers. I also used the BBC website so I could get an unbiased view of the pay wall’s progress. All of these searches returned a range of in depth and useful results. So I went on to search the recommended site inute.ac.uk to find pre-approved educational sources. This search returned no results, despite using a number of different phrases and angles in my attempts. This is most likely due to the pay wall being such a recent thing. For the same reason looking in books in the library and on google books only led to outdated or irrelevant guesses about the future of online journalism. So in my search for a recently published and relevant book I decided to find some names of experts by looking at media professors in leading media universities and searching for their books. It was a bit of a long shot but from looking at Goldsmiths professors I managed to find an extract from Professor Bob Franklin’s book ‘The Future of Online Journalism’ which had a vast amount of useful information from a selection of leading media analysis experts.
When assessing the initial sources I realised that although I had a lot of opinion and information there were very few statistics in my secondary research so I searched again on beehivecity.com. I also attempted to use the recommended sites on the research blog for gathering specific statistics such as www.abc.org.uk and www.alexa.com to look at the UK newspaper readership figures and the online volume of traffic on any website. This however, did not work well in measuring the statistics following the raising of the pay wall because The Times are being very protective of their sales figures in this vulnerable stage.
My secondary sources were predominantly opinion pieces from the newspapers so were bias but I tried to find an equal amount on each side. This proved difficult as most sources that weren’t under a pay wall disagreed with it, so I have far more anti pay wall opinion pieces. In hindsight I should have paid to look at what Times writers had said but after talking to one in summer I’m aware that the News Corp employees are under a contract that says they are not allowed to express any negative opinions about it openly, so that information would’ve been relatively useless and blindingly bias. If I were to repeat my secondary research I would try and find more articles about the writers that resigned from The Times when the pay wall was raised. Some of my other sources did come from unbiased sources such as the BBC website and the cited statistics on Beehive City. As well as this Bob Franklin’s book offered a balanced view, which was a very useful source and I regret not using it in my report, but I avoided it due to the sheer density and high level of language, which was somewhat overwhelming and hard to break down.
In my secondary research I felt it would be best to look closely at public opinion of the pay wall because it is the public reaction that will shape journalism’s future. I began by putting together a short online survey. Short because I wanted as many people as possible to answer the most useful questions rather than few people bother replying to lots of relatively redundant ones. Assessing that now, I could have benefited from adding a few more questions, possibly about which newspapers and online resources people prefer. However I did gather very useful information including quotes and statistics about what each person thought. I think the strength in my survey was in the variety of the respondents. I put the survey all over my facebook, sent it out in emails and made sure that everyone I know had access to the link. I also wanted strangers to fill it in so I posted the link on the wall of large newspaper’s facebooks and relevant facebook groups. The statistics and quotes gathered for the survey were incredibly useful in my final report. The results would have been far more useful, however, if I could have gathered replies from a larger network of potential respondents like companies can and if it had covered an even more varied demographic. A survey of this scale is not as reliable or useful as one with many more replies.
When looking at the results of the survey, however, I decided that although it gave me a relatively broad idea of some people’s opinions with some specific answers, it would be beneficial to have a more in depth view. And since different demographics are likely to have very different opinions I decided to conduct two interviews. One young female and one, not quite so young, male. I was happy with the results of the two interviews and felt my questions and technique led to relatively in depth answers from both respondents. Had I had more time and access to a wider range of demographics I would have liked to have conducted more interviews as they returned valuable results.
From the interviews and survey I gathered that many people would consider paying for online journalism if a subscription could offer them significantly more than buying a print copy. For this reason I went on to do some cross comparison of The Times Copy and The Times Online. I tried to cover as many different points of difference as possible and the results were in fact more interesting than I had expected. After doing this comparison I decided to look at some secondary sources of The Times’ print sales since the raising of the pay wall, because the online subscription seems to be considerably better value for money. This added an update to my secondary sources as well as more current information for my report. Had I had more time I would have also done a cross reference of The Times Online against a free online journalism source from a top British newspaper.
My report brought together this gathered information, but looking at it again I regret not using more of my sources in as much depth as I perhaps could have. However I wanted to deliver an interesting report on what could seem like a relatively dull topic and felt it best to bring to attention the most relevant, interesting and important information. I feel I wrote my report (which was in the form of a powerpoint) a bit last minute, but was not disappointed with the end product. I used my preferred style of light slides and lots of my own notes for presenting and felt this was best technique for such a subject. I mainly used my primary research as there was so much repetitive or contradictory discussion in the secondary. I began the presentation with the most concise and useful quotes and figures which brought it all together in a way that I was pleased with. However it seems I was wrong to assume that my audience had at least tiny level of knowledge on the pay wall, although I did briefly explain it in my introduction. Some said they didn’t understand what the word meant, which was surprising but fair. Were I to do it again to a similar audience I would attempt to explain it better, without being patronising (which was why I didn’t have a particularly large explanation in the first place). In my presentation I felt I did do well to involve the audience and try and make them think in order to illustrate the points. And I’d say the same for my slightly comedic and visual slides. Looking again at my notes I feel they met the requirements stated in the brief and I think I used my sources creatively and didn’t blab on too much. Condensing the information into decent points was the strength, depth was perhaps the downfall. Though I made sure all the relevant points were included with enough depth to explain each one. Overall I was happy with my report and felt I explained and understood a very decent amount for a five minute slide show without skimming over any of my notes or missing much out. I also used all of my slides and kept to the time limit.
My research of the raising of the online pay wall by journalistic sources such as The Times returned a large variety of results and interesting and surprisingly contradictory opinions from journalists and respondents of my primary research. The timing of the research was so early on in the development of this new change that it was not possible to reach any real conclusion about the future. I did however discover a range of thoughts and theories that were useful. My primary research would have greatly benefited from more time and resources, of course, and it would be very interesting interesting indeed to see similar research from a large research company. But, as I said in my report only time will tell what will happen to free and indeed subscription only journalism online.
