An email from the South China Morning Post arrived a few days ago:
A personal message from Publisher Christopher Axberg:
I would personally like to welcome you back to scmp.com, by inviting you to register for a complimentary 21-day trial.
An scmp.com subscription ensures you maintain your connection to Hong Kong and Greater China and the events shaping their development.
You will gain access to daily breaking news, special reports, e-newsletters, travel guides and updates on financial markets, lifestyle trends, and sporting events. Plus, you’ll get news to go with weekly podcasts, PDA downloads and SMS alerts.
Dear Christopher Axberg, this is a personal message from Jeremy Goldkorn, publisher of Danwei:
First of all, what arrived in my inbox was not a personal message, but a computer generated form that my software marked as spam.
Secondly: Keeping all of your content behind a paywall is a recipe for irrelevance, especially for a newspaper that aspires to regional influence.
It is not possible to link to any scmp.com story because everything, every single article on the website is behind the paywall. Even the websites of The Economist and the Financial Times offer a generous amount of content for free, while the New York Times offers all new articles except for opinion columns for free for a week. Needless to say those three publications also have well deserved reputations for high standards, which the South China Morning Post has not enjoyed for some years.
The South China Morning Post has a large team of journalists and editors, and deep pockets thanks to many years of profitable operations, and being owned by the hydra-like Kuok Group. It is probably the only currently existing publication that could dominate the Greater China online market.
If the newspaper aspires to winning new readers outside its home territory, the Internet should be a key part of the strategy. But when the casual reader cannot view any of their content without signing up for a paid subcription, and when bloggers who drive traffic to news stories, cannot link to any of the articles, scmp.com is dooming itself to Internet obscurity. Further evidence that the South China Morning Post just does not get the Internet: the website appears to be updated only once a day, as though it was a print newspaper.
It is increasingly looking like Hong Kong’s other English language newspaper The Standard, which is free to read on the Internet, is going to continue gaining on its more established rival.
Not everyone would agree with the views about free content expressed above. Martin Sorrel, the chief executive of WPP — a man who has certainly made a lot more money from the communications business than anyone at Danwei — recently “told the Newspaper Society Home Truths conference this week that he has “always had a problem with free content”. You can read about his problem here: Stop offering free content, Sorrell warns press execs.
UPDATE: It seems that there is one open access section of scmp.com: their podcasts.