Sunday, October 04, 2009

What is happening to FT's China Confidential?

borderImage via Wikipedia
Just before the weekend CEO John Ridding gave an interview to The Guardian, explaining why he firmly believes in paid content for good journalism.
Traditional media are firmly divided in two schools of believers in the survival of journalism, those who believe readers are willing to pay for decent content, although so much is available for free on the internet. And those - and I belong to that school - who believes that journalism still has a future, but only when it is paid for by other sources, like advertisements.
The Financial Times is partly surviving on those subscriptions - as tries the Wall Street Journal - and although I belong to the non-believers, I would most certainly not mind to be wrong. Now, what says Ridding in The Guardian?
"I fundamentally believe readers are willing to pay for quality journalism," Ridding told MediaGuardian.co.uk.
"One of the worries for the industry in general is kind of a cultural expectation that news information should be free and we would challenge that because we believe quality journalism requires investment and investment requires revenues."
What struck me was that one of the paid initiatives that the Financial Times started earlier this year, China Confidential, lead by former China correspondent James Kynge. I was skeptical at the time about its chances of surviving, and hoped that John Redding would have used that initiative to support his believe in paid content with a few bits of facts.
I have not heard about China Confidential since its start, I realized. The website is still active. Any insights here?
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I absolutely agreed with paid contents even thought some OR most of them are way beyond me to pay as a private person. But that does not have to be. We did not have this kind of problems before. We used to pay for what we WANT and not sponge on FREE stuff. And therefore I agreed media should be paid for hiring good people to produce reliable, accurate contents for the public.

There are many problems since we have internet. I will just list one or two. Since we have internet WE all think that we can all contribute, or retrive information from the net. The problem is how many of the information are ACCURATE? Not just correct. Especially with technological information, information out there quickly becomes INACCURATE. So, to make sure one has accurate information, one has to keep up with all changes and that takes time. And times mean money.

Wikipedia. It is a great source of information, loads of volunteers working towards achieving the goal of free information for all. BUT, it would be foolish to think that Wikipedia can be done without money. What I find most annoying with Wikipedia is, it is such a great resources for the world, YET, we cannot FULLY agreed that ALL information from Wikipedia is accurate. AND we cannot forced Wikipedia to take responsibilities IF what we quoted turns out to be inaccurate ... hence the delima of not able to use Wikipdia as a source for research (initial phase yes).

WHAT if Wikipedia is a PAID source for information? What would be the usefulness of Wikipedia to the reserach world? Or university students? I am sure it would become as reliable as the rock of Gilbrata. So why don't we do that, why don't Wikipedia just charge subscriber 20 euro or so a year to help pay for the great work? I would gladly pay for that (therefore a FIXed donation).

What we see now is a market that is fragmented. Many people want to sell their writing/product, but how many can I buy as an individual? I am writing my thesis, I have to read many documents. Very often a 15 page of document (written by a professor for example) would cost 35 dollars. If I need 10 of them, I would be broke.

I am all for professors selling their work. It is after all their brain child, but I think to make sure we all GET to their products, and reproduced their hard-work, ideas, we have to go back to the old fashion way --- sell to libraries or publishers.

We become so fragmented and individualistic. We are like a plate of sand. To survive in this world, we need glue, we need cohesion. We need to think a bigger picture and NOT just what is infront of our noses.

Therefore we SHOULD GO BACK to HELPING to pay for information that we need. We have to stop the cultures of GREED and SPONGE on the hard labour of others.

Last words --- information that is NOT-accurate CAN literally KILL. Depends on what kind of situation one is in.

I am sorry that this is not a very cohesive piece of writing. I did not proof-read it. I just hope my ideas get through

Cindy