I’m sold on paying for the Times

When Rupert Murdoch first announced he was putting The Times and Sunday Times behind a paywall I thought it was a rather silly idea.

I was determined I would never pay for it, after all when news is available everywhere else on the web for free (or at least ad-funded) what was the point in paying.

I have changed my mind.

If the News Corp had just taken Times Online, the merged site with content from the Times and Sunday Times and slapped a paywall on that – I wouldn’t have been even slightly interested.

Yes I would have missed reading Clarkson’s columns but somebody would have posted them somewhere else on the web anyway.

But they didn’t do that – they took the concept of a newspaper, a place to read the latest news, information and opinion and merged the best bits of that with the best of what the web can do to create two beautiful, interactive and easy to use websites.

They then packed it full of creative journalism and took a straight forward story and showed it in a different way.

Plus, £2 a week is a very good price, it’s at a level where I can probably pay for it without giving it too much thought – it’s about the same price as Spotify Premium.

Obviously I’d have prefered it to be free or to be packaged up with my Sky subscription but a company has the right to charge for its content – I would pay more than £2 a week for The Times and Sunday Times print editions.

Yes, in that instance I get the paper which costs to print – but a lot of people forget the actual cost of stories – just because you can’t touch something doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost to produce.

A new phone might cost £500 retail and it might work out at costing £100 to make – but you’re not factoring in the millions it cost in design, research and development – that all has to be paid for.

It’s the same with journalism – yes the online edition costs less to produce but there are still server costs, hosting costs,  software licensing costs etc…

Then there is the cost of journalism – it costs money to employ a journalist, a sub-editor, a designer, a photo editor and even more still if that journalist goes to cover a story in Afghanistan, Iraq or even Australia.

Photographers need to be paid for the photos posted with stories, freelancers need to be paid for the stories they write – it all costs money.

OK so I can throw together a blog and write stories for nothing – but I couldn’t do that if I didn’t have a full time job to put food on the table and a roof over my head – this is a hobby.

That’s why I’m going to pay for The Times – but if many more papers go down the same route, much like I’d only pay for one print paper a day – I’d have to pick and chose which online source I paid for.

Then – there’s always the BBC to fall back on if you don’t want to pay for Journalism

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