POPE OPERA - WILL THE PRESS MESS THIS UP?

                                                    Photo: Jari Kurittu via Flikr

Tabloid editors have no doubt been brainstorming their papal exclusives over the past few days. The recent destruction of Ricky Hatton, Wayne Rooney and the Pakistani cricket team  must have seemed like mere child’s play compared to an opportunity to be let lose with the Holy See on home turf. He might have been concerned about that Dan Brown bloke but he hasn't met the News of the World's investigations team yet. So am I the only one who shudders to think of the results when our rabid newspapers cover this visit?

There's a chance of course it could be treated like any normal big news event - with page 3’s Gemma from Essex proffering her opinion on contraception while wearing Rosary beads, a big white hat and not much else. Of course a senior politician could be overheard calling him a bigoted old man. Perhaps someone will try to hack his mobile. Either way - an un-christian like hatred already seemed to seep into the coverage with this offering from The Sun. Now I'm particularly looking forward to seeing how the Daily Star and Press TV handle the week's events. It's probably not the Vatican's travelling journalists - collectively known as 'The Vat Pack' by the way - that British Catholics should be worried about.

I kind of hope it's possible to have a debate about the shotcomings of the catholic church, hold it's figurehead to account over the horrific cases of child abuse, show respect to the UK's millions of catholics, hear all sides of the debate fairly and balance the story well. But I don't think every British journalist has it in them.

A colleague once told me the story of an ‘incident’ at his TV station. A foul mouthed producer was lining up a very senior religious figure for a live studio interview. Thinking her talkback could only be heard by the floor manager she struggled to get him in the correct position and eventually bellowed "tell the c*** in the dress to move left a bit." The holy man leaned forward slightly and whispered gently into the microphone: "I’m sorry does she mean me?"

If the story is true then God only knows what might happen.

NEWS COSTS LOTS. MURDOCH MIGHT BE RIGHT.

Stop press! Hold the front page! The Internet behemoth Google has backed down to media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The top telly and tabloid boss insisted people pay for his scoops while the online giant wanted to offer them for free. (ok enough headline hyperbole for now)

Seriously though, Murdoch has been strenuously insisting “there’s no such thing as free news” and Google - who had previously aggregated his content on their search engine – have now said they will allow him to charge readers after a certain number of clicks - A scary prospect that could seriously change the way we consume information…. And I’m weirdly bi-polar about this whole issue.

As a normal person I dislike parting with money in return for information, but as a working journalist (in a Murdoch newsroom no less) I like getting paid for writing. And while Murdoch is often a man people love to hate I think he might be right about this.

CASH STRAPPED
Because there IS no such thing as free news…because news is really REALLY expensive. Take a simple top story from today, the stray yachtsmen being released from Iran, and join me for a quick audit of the costs behind covering it.

Well to stand any chance you really need a journalist and a snapper in a place like Dubai and you’re paying for everything from the stamps in their passport to the food on their plate plus the petrol in their car. And they’re only half the team. Your UK reporter needs last minute plane tickets to follow the families from Plymouth to London as they dash for a foreign office meeting, and a hotel when he gets there. When they file their words and pictures you need salaries for subs and designers who will hammer it into something resembling a newspaper page, plus webmasters and printers to turf it back out to the public. All the above work in a cavernous newsroom that needs heating, lighting, cleaning and protecting by security people, that’s before you consider gallons of ink, millions of bits of paper, acres of London real estate and miles of computer servers too. All for just one top story on one average day. We’ve not even mentioned chequebook journalism, costly investigations, protecting people in war zones or those times you have to charter a plane.

Advertising once paid for much of this but it’s fallen off a cliff. And circulation has been dropping for years now too. So where’s the money coming from? This is what drives Murdoch’s argument that the advertising model is dead…people will have to pay from here on in. A colleague tells me this probably won’t involve paying per click in the end. You will get a subscription package to several papers, perhaps bundled in with your Sky TV.

CHALLENGER
It’s already a crowded argument with Google and Murdoch but EXTRA, EXTRA, there’s a third challenger in the ring, another big name weighing in. Arianna Huffington of The Huffington post (bow down bloggers) has hit back at Murdoch saying his idea makes for bad business, big blogs are surviving fine, the future is a hybrid one and the old press barons should have got their act together before the world transformed around them.

Her hilarious slap down is well worth a read; even if doesn’t quite solve the problem of where the money is coming from.

The key thing really though is the pace of change. Bill Clinton once said ‘you should never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.’ The problem is soon nobody will any more. ‘You should never pick a fight with people who enjoy more than a million unique users…doesn’t quite have the same ring to it…does it?