Some newspapers are better at telling the truth than others (The Economist is high up in this particular pecking order).  Bloggers publish blogs for a variety of reasons, not necessarily for money and some have more integrity than others.  An ocean of content is well on its way to appearing all over the internet and this has significant implications for investors in several stockmarket sectors.

Newspapers are struggling to survive as more & more people get connected to the internet.  The freesheet Metro now claims to distribute 1.3 mln copies daily aound Britain’s big cities.  Some of the newspapers’ problems are brought into sharp relief when they try to move their editions online.  Many of the stories newspapers carry on any particular day are not unique (and one paper’s  “exclusives” are quickly copied by later editions of their rivals).  Simply glancing at any newsstand confirms that many papers lead with the same story as their rivals each day.  A particular problem is that newspapers generally charge a cover price to sell their print editions but post the same stories to their online editions for free viewing by anyone with an internet connection (in this way they are under-cutting themselves by supplying their next generation of readers for free online – limiting their websites to allow viewing of five free articles per day is not going to help either).  News aggregators such as Google News then pick up these free stories and the newspapers lose their advertising revenue by moving online as advertisers cannot be guaranteed that a reader of one particular story online will ever see their advert which appears on a different “page” of the online newspaper (or does not appear at all on the aggregator’s site).

The BBC makes life even more difficult for UK-based newspapers as the BBC has an excellent news service with worldwide correspondents.  It has also invested part of its licence fee funding in building an excellent website, so why should UK residents, who have already subscribed to the BBC via their annual licence fee (currently £135 per household and excellent value-for-money when compared to the annual cost of buying a newspaper), pay for a newspaper to read essentially the same story (which has been tweaked a little).  Now that kids in today’s households are growing up used to accessing online media content for free (as well as YouTube videos for free and music for free too), there is no way they are going to accept paying for internet content in the future.  The Wall Street Journal, The Times and the FT are fighting a losing battle in trying to charge for access to their online content – I recently received (and declined) an offer to subscribe to FT.com for £1.49 a week which compares with the £2.50 I spend every Saturday buying the FT Weekend edition.  Regional weekly papers can survive as they serve a niche delivering local news, classified ads and are attractive to local advertisers – and most of them are already free.

It all comes down to the fact that original content is what really matters and this is the only offering that is unique and can be charged for.  Lots of sports fans happily pay their Sky subscriptions in order to watch their team’s matches live.  Sky has invested some of this subscription money in building an impressive news operation.  ITV seems to have no coherent plan whatsoever as to how to tackle the threat & embrace the opportunity of the internet and it has been reluctant to develop its website for fear of diverting eyeballs (and therefore advertising revenue) away from its broadcast channels.

In the battle between press barons and the bloggers, it is quite possible that daily national newspapers will go out of business and simultaneously the hordes of bloggers will, by their sheer numbers, drown each other out and struggle to attract traffic to their websites.  The question of how an interested reader is going to find quality commentary easily amidst a choice of a million different blogs & websites will likely be served by ”aggregator sites”, which will derive their revenue from advertising and end up supplying news & intelligent commentary, paying their (effectively freelance) contributors individually for each piece accepted for publication (The Week is a weekly paper version of this business model).  This also implies that the creators of original content will struggle to monetise their content (beyond its initial sale to an “aggregator site”) as there is simply no way of asserting copyright rights when the delivery channel is via the Internet.

Quite where politics, spin & trying to influence the daily news agenda fits into this brave new (paper-less) world is difficult to see.  The days of newspapers existing to sell copies (and to further the political ambitions of their proprietors) are fast coming to an end.  Some order will undoubtedly emerge out of the chaos of a million blogs.  As for making any money out of media in the future, it will probably come down to two separate paths – on the one hand the myriad content deliverers trying to collect revenue from advertisers and on the other hand broadband ISPs collecting their monthly premiums for providing high-speed internet access to their subscribers.  All this translates into avoiding TV broadcasters, TV content producers, newspaper publishers and investing instead into the telecoms sector (both fixed-line and mobile broadband suppliers).