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.