To kill a mockingbird
Jinfo Blog

11th October 2007

By Tim Buckley Owen

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‘Steady and moderate growth’ is Outsell’s latest forecast for the information industry from 2007 to 2010. But its Information Industry Outlook 2008 http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/527 ($895) warns that performance will vary between segments, and predicts that successful companies will be ‘agile and adaptive solutions providers’. No one will need to be more agile and adaptive at the moment than news providers – and a second Outsell offering, News Providers & Publishers: 2007 Market Forecast and Trends Report http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/528 ($2,495) carries a bleak message. ‘Growth hits the wall - falling into negative territory’ is Outsell’s blunt prognosis. Such developments have already driven the New York Times to abandon charging for online news, with the Wall Street Journal likely to follow suit shortly – so all eyes are now on the Financial Times. Sure enough, it came out with its announcement at the start of this month – but stopped significantly short of free news. Instead, under its Project Mockingbird access model, it will offer 30 free stories a month to all comers in return for ‘light touch registration’, but continue with a full charged-for subscription service thereafter. So how can it manage it when its global competitors seem to be fleeing in precisely the opposite direction? ‘We are special and different and that is fundamental,’ FT Chief Executive John Ridding told Media Guardian http://digbig.com/4tsjt on 1 October. ‘We are business news, high-end, quality independent news in a specialist area... we are very confident that people are prepared to pay a reasonable price for FT journalism.’ It’s a bold claim but there’s evidence to support it; the FT says that each web user of its site is as valuable to the company as each print reader, because of the subscription fee and premium advertising the site attracts. ‘This is in great contrast to other newspaper sites, which can need to find between five and 20 web readers to replace each print reader and maintain revenue,’ Media Guardian suggests. So confident is the FT of its ‘differentness’ that it’s going even further. As reported in detail in October’s VIP http://www.vivavip.com/vip/ it’s also introducing content licensing for organizations with 10 or more users – including those who access via third party aggregators such as LexisNexis or Factiva. This isn’t the first time the FT has tried to profit from its differentness. Nearly 15 years ago, it attracted the attention of the Monopolies & Mergers Commission (predecessor to the Competition Commission) following a series of attempts to limit aggregators’ access to its content with the aim of driving business to its own FT Profile service. So will the mockingbird fly this time – or will it be killed?

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