Breakingviews founder Mike Dixon, speaking to Chris Tryhorn in The Guardian (via Press Gazette):
The temptation if you’ve got to cut costs by 5 per cent is just to salami slice and everyone works a bit harder and quality just deteriorates a little bit more. What you end up with when you finally decide to put it behind a paywall is something that’s not good enough to persuade people to pay for.
Media groups have got to focus much more clearly on what is their unique selling point – keep the investment there, possibly increase the investment there, and everything else, which may be necessary as part of a package, because a newspaper is a package, they don’t have to produce themselves, they can buy that in.
I’m not convinced by anybody’s arguments that paywalls are a viable way to make internet services pay, particularly if current qualities are anything to go by. Once you lock away your newspaper content from a public gaze, you then have to devote much more energy and resources into marketing that content in order to gain conversions to digital subscribers — and that will likely eat up most, if not all, of any revenues which a paywall may generate.
Concentrating on a USP is far more likely to generate increased returns.
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