Whose opinion matters?

By Tom Mattey – Graphics Specialist, Echo Research

Does anyone know how the Times is faring with its paywall? I am genuinely interested to see if the concept of paying for online news is a success. My initial reaction to the idea was one of scepticism. From my point of view, if I want to be updated and gather news then I have an infinite number of free websites available to me, each with various political stances, the emphasis of a story presented from different angles and with varying objectives on what the writer intends to lead his readers to consider. So why would I pay for a single viewpoint?

This attitude of wanting a range of sources is not born of any scholarly conviction, but because (as I previously pointed out) I am a sceptic. I don’t quite believe the account of a single person, especially one of a journalist whose motivation for delivering information to me may be profit by sensationalism. I prefer multiple accounts of an event because I think that by taking the consistencies in a given story across several reports, one can gain some idea of what really happened.

A world away from the Times’ website is another form of news delivery that I listened to on a drive home from work recently, Radio 1’s news programme, Newsbeat, which is made for a younger demographic than the Times, and as a result could be accused of ‘dumbing down’ its reports to make them more accessible for a younger generation. What is interesting about the reports is what happens after the story has been outlined and the time comes to analyse it.

Newsbeat’s method is to ask random people on the street what their opinion is. The report will be delivered by the reporter, as you’d expect. But then the Newsbeat listener is subjected to a stream of often un-informed and frequently irrelevant opinion. And that is the end of the report. Nothing explained, no information gathered whatsoever.

This problem is starting to spread and many news websites now simply report some of the facts of the story and then allow readers to comment in place of expert opinion. It is that expert opinion that I think we would miss most if the death of the newspaper ever occurred.

Some have speculated that the huge growth of social media and the internet has given birth to and raised a universal belief in the west that every person’s opinion is important. This seems to me to be a misunderstanding of freedom of speech, inflamed by popular culture and some countries’ insistence on overusing the word ‘freedom’ (usually while oppressing goat farmers somewhere near an oil well). While everyone is (for the most part) entitled to their opinion and the means to voice it without fear of reprisal, I don’t agree that everyone’s opinion is important. My opinion on medicine for example is of no importance whatsoever compared to that of a trained doctor, and it is the same in every other field (and no, the irony of talking about importance of opinions on a blog isn’t lost on me).

I can see some truth in the Times’ argument. Experts cost money. Modern news reporting requires resources and personnel on a global scale and I’m really not sure if the advertising revenue of a website that size would be enough to sustain top quality reporting and research. Simply put, if we don’t want to pay, we won’t get such a high level of insight and explanation of complex stories.

Whatever form we take our news in these days, there is no underestimating the huge power it holds. The media can bring down governments, get laws and constitutions changed, ruin or build business empires and start revolutions. And so now, when that hugely important story comes up, one that will affect a decision you will have to make as a voter, or as a consumer, a parent or as a citizen of a nation, would you rather it be delivered in a carefully explained format, dissected by experts so you can better understand all the relevant aspects, or would you rather just hear the ill-informed random ranting of a reader?

The opinions and views expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Echo Research, its staff or any of its affiliates.

Walls

By Nigel Middlemiss, Knowledge Director, Echo Research

This week, The Economist writes about the Internet and “walls”. It criticises the growth of exclusive communities as unfriendly to unrestrained commerce. These are so clearly at odds with the magazine’s well-known free-market, no-holds-barred views on competition.

One wall it talks about is the one that nations put up. The Economist suggests China should lower its “great firewall” against the internet, and let in liberal opinion. Greater openness would nourish the ideas of Chinese scientists. A thousand innovations would bloom and bring in billions of renminbi. Only …. I’m sorry to say to say this is a wistful dream. China’s wealth generation has come about partly because employee incomes can be so tightly contained; dictatorship is part of its commercial success. The free flow of ideas would loosen and eventually wrench away the levers of power from The Party – unthinkable to them.

What would have been fascinating would be to hear the Economist’s thoughts on another kind of wall: the “paywall” that News International has thrown up round the online Times and others in the NI stable. Some estimates are that reader traffic has dropped off there by an astonishing 80-90% since June. Correspondingly, advertising is said to have slumped as readership reach has dwindled. Some of the alleged economics look even more worrisome for the Murdoch dynasty: £1.4m a year extra from online subscribers, compared with an annual loss from all NI titles of £490m, looks a drop in the ocean.

But despite the decline in hard-copy newspapers, people are as news-savvy, as well-informed, and as well- entertained by media of one kind or another as ever they were. People are still being influenced by the media, but the media have become diffuse and multiple, and the trick is understand exactly which media count, and when, where, and how they exercise their subtle but persuasive influence.

The opinions and views expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Echo Research, its staff or any of its affiliates.