Ángel Arrese

From Gratis to Paywalls

To make readers pay for news content has always been a fundamental way to generate revenues for the press and an essential part of its business model. However, the arrival of the internet in the mid-1990s changed this business logic for many newspapers, as they delivered their content on the internet for free, waiting for a return based almost exclusively on advertising revenues. For more than a decade, most publishers adopted the new logic of gratis online news for readers. But this started to change, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. This article analyses the history of this change in the business strategy of the press, reflecting the introduction of different payment systems, and finally paywalls, to generate revenues for online newspapers. The study distinguishes four stages in the evolution of journalistic paywalls and points out the interest in considering the process of paywall adoption as a retro-innovation. This brief history of paywalls also shows how some prestigious brands, certain business leaders and a few specialized fields of journalistic activity—such as the economic and business press—have made a considerable contribution to the growing popularity of new payment systems among media companies.

The role of economic journalism in political transitions

Due to its peculiar nature, the economic and financial press, throughout history, has had a particular liberty of action in times of tight media controls imposed by the authorities. Both the type of content that it spreads – technical information useful for markets and businesses – and its limited public visibility – with tiny, but influential, audiences – have facilitated this media’s carte blanche to influence elite public opinion in moments of profound political and economic change. This phenomenon can be analysed in some detail around the processes of the political transitions experienced in many authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in the last third of the 20th century. As discussed in this article, economic publications played an important role in changing the mindset of the ruling classes in Argentina, Spain, Russia, China and South Africa, before and after political changes, during times when freedom of the press was restricted for other media.

Legacy and Native News Brands Online: Do They Show Different News Consumption Patterns?

ABSTRACT The distinction between legacy media and digital media has frequently been used to analyze the journalistic and commercial contrast between traditional media (offline) and new media (online). However, little research has been carried out on the degree to which legacy brands differ from digital native brands in the digital environment. Are legacy and digital native news brands associated with similar news consumption patterns, or do those patterns differ substantially? This work intends to give an answer to this question, taking as a reference the Spanish case. The underlying assumption of this study is the idea that legacy brands carry over into the digital world some of the consumption characteristics of their old products, which could differ greatly from those associated with new digital native products. While not in the manner initially planned, the study confirms the existence of small differences in those characteristics between groups of brands, but mostly related to journalistic factors, not marketing ones. These findings have important consequences for the branding of legacy and native news brands.

A comparative study of metaphors in press reporting of the Euro crisis

This article aims to analyze the use of economic metaphors in the particular case of the European sovereign debt crisis, by the examination of the public discourse as reflected in the daily press. Three countries of the European Union with severe sovereign debt problems (Greece, Italy, and Spain) and three countries without them (Finland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) have been selected for analysis. The general hypothesis, in accordance with the research undertaken in similar studies on economic metaphors and on the uniformity of economic journalism frames, is that one can expect a fairly common use of the same metaphors and with the same weight among countries, types of newspapers, and diverse economic conditions. The findings basically support this hypothesis, showing how difficult it is for the media, even when using rhetorical devices such as economic metaphors, to stand aside from the experts’ discourse or to forge new ways of analyzing economic events outside the traditional and prevalent frames.

Contents as Products in Media Markets

Media products usually comprise two components: a nonmaterial element (journalistic, fiction, persuasive, etc., called content) and a material element (whereby the content is distributed and made accessible to consumers, typically referred to as a platform). While both components function in tandem in the market as regards meeting needs, consumer demand is primarily linked to content; the role of communication or transmission platforms is secondary in this regard, although they may be crucial to such concerns as accessibility (Murphy. How television invented new media. Rutgers University Press, 2011; Chun. Control and freedom: Power and paranoia in the age of fiber optic. MIT, 2006).