Apple top man Steve Jobs fears that the internet will be reduced “into a nation of bloggers” unless a sustainable way of persuading people to pay for online content is devised.
Speaking at the Wall Street Journal-organised D8 conference near Los Angeles, Jobs said that newspapers’ and magazines’ futures, along with that of quality journalism, depended on media outlets finding a way of making it worthwhile for readers to pay to look at website content.
“One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free healthy press, some of these newspapers, the news gathering and editorial organisations are really important,” he said.
“I don’t want to see us descend to a nation of bloggers. I think we need editorial more than ever right now.
“Anything that we can do to help news gathering organisations find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid so they can keep their news gathering and editorial operations intact, I’m all for it.”
He was keen, of course, to stress the possible role which his company’s latest big thing, the iPad tablet computer, could play in facilitating this shift in attitudes.
“What we have to do is figure out a way to get people to start paying for this hard earned content. And so this (the iPad) provides us with a potential opportunity to provide more value than a web page and start charging for that,” Jobs said.
However, Jobs appeared to hint that his attempts to take a hard line over charging for iPad apps had made media owners reluctant to develop their own apps, reported Gordon McMillan on MediaWeek magazine’s The Wall blog.
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“I’m trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they charge traditionally for print because they don’t have the expenses of printing, they don’t have the expenses of delivery, and to charge a reasonable price and go for volume. I think people are willing to pay for content,” Jobs concluded.
His assertion seems to have been borne out by early sales of The Times newspaper’s iPad edition, which was reported to have sold 5,000 six-day subscriptions, at GBP9.99 each (about US$16), in its first three days of availability.