Richard Freudenstein PANPA Speech: Our Future: How Print and Digital Must Evolve to Succeed

Our Future: How Print and Digital Must Evolve to Succeed

Speech given by Richard Freudenstein, Chief Executive Officer, News Digital Media

PANPA Future Forum, Sydney, Thursday September 10, 2009

Good afternoon. Thank you Mark and thank you PANPA for inviting me today. It’s a bit of a mixed honour being asked to speak at the end of the day, being the last person standing between you and a well earned drink.

Having said that, I’m delighted to be here and appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today on my view of what a newspaper company needs to think about so that it can charge for its journalism, whether in print, online, mobile or any other medium we can imagine.

 It is without doubt the most talked about media issue of the moment. Indeed, given this is such an emotive topic – one about which it appears everyone wants to share their opinion on – I’d like to hear your thoughts.

So, for the next 15 or 20 minutes, I’ll share some of News Limited’s current thinking with you.

 And then we’ll throw things open for questions. To start, I should probably deal with the one question that everyone in the room is thinking.

Why will people pay for something that is currently free? All of us at News are only too aware of the negative commentary in the blogosphere. I have two responses - Firstly, all the evidence suggests these very vocal sceptics aren’t actually representative of the general population.

As I’ll talk about a bit later, it appears that a good proportion of the general public think it is reasonable to charge for online news.

Secondly our initiative is not about just charging for what people currently get on News Limited sites.

It’s about creating products that are of real value to consumers and delivering it in ways that our audience demand.

Full transcript is attached.