Huffington defends online model

The simmering debate over charging for content online boiled over on Thursday as the publisher of Europe’s largest newspaper dismissed the business model of a site hailed as the future of news.

Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, told Arianna Huffington that a Polish newspaper his company set up at the same time as she founded HuffingtonPost.com in 2005 was already making more in profit than the rumoured $6m-$10m her site was seeing in revenue.

His on-stage argument that people would be willing to pay for high-quality reporting was applauded by many in the audience at the Monaco Media Forum, but applause also greeted his opponent’s retort: “You are incredibly convincing and you will be proved incredibly wrong.”

Ms Huffington declined to disclose her revenue or profits but said that online readers would pay only for financial information and “weird porn”. “You are trying to enter into the same river twice. That river has gone,” she told Mr Döpfner.

The publisher of Bild Zeitung, which still reaches 12m readers a day in print, echoed Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp, in accusing news aggregators of “stealing”, and argued that only “web communists” believed people would not pay for specialist sports, environmental or local reporting.

“Is it more democratic to go into a supermarket and get a can of beer for free? How absurd,” he said. Addressing Ms Huffington, he added: “My only request would be, please brew your beer yourself. Don’t take our beer and offer it for free.”

Ms Huffington poured scorn on print media, accusing it of attention deficit disorder and arguing that its failure to spot the financial crisis coming showed that paid journalists were “selling their independence for access”.

While Mr Döpfner agreed that there was “a crisis of journalism”, he challenged the idea that print media faced certain demise. In its latest results, out this week, Axel Springer’s German papers generated a 25.4 per cent margin. “If print is dying, this death feels pretty comfortable.”

The verbal duel saw Mr Döpfner predict that “mixed models”, combining free and paid content with strong copyright protection, could take 10 years to mature. Readers had to be “seduced” with new offerings, not re-educated, he said.

He expressed scepticism about Mr Murdoch’s threat to close off his news sites from Google’s search engine, but said smartphones offered new opportunities for publishers to charge. “We look forward to you charging for what is available on cellphones and us not charging,” Ms Huffington said.