The Guardian is considering charging for content in some specialist areas of guardian.co.uk such as MediaGuardian, Guardian Media Group chief executive Carolyn McCall revealed today, Press Gazette reports.
PG quotes McCall, speaking at the opening session of the Fipp World Magazine Congress in London, as saying: "If you are a national news site which prides itself on high quality content, if you have the BBC which can put out content for free on every single aspect of politics, current affairs, government, community - it's very difficult to pay for content because you are in competition with the BBC."
But she added: "There will be some parts of our website - MediaGuardian, specialist areas - where we should think about how we should charge for content."
Interesting. After Murdoch's statement about charging for online news, lots of media companies in my part of the world came forward and said they'd charge for online news. It had me give some thought to what online content I'd pay for, and I would certainly pay for MediaGuardian whereas I'm in to minds about paying for FT.com. I do currently pay for it, but since I'm mostly just reading the limited output of FT's media section it's not such a great deal (which is ironic 'cause I'm very interested in media business - M&As, company results etc - stuff that's traditionally been the domain of FT, but I think MediaGuardian covers it more comprehensively). Were MediaGuardian to start charging for online content I might even drop FT in favour of it.
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