Who will pay for a free press?

To confront James Murdoch's "profit is good" stance with a "public sevice is better" is pointless. James Murdoch has every interest in attacking the BBC, but his parting remark to an Edinburgh media audience that profit was the only guarantor of good news services should not be answered in kind.

The news and its importance to democracy is not to be confused with the various business models that oversee its production, "public" or "private".

Murdoch's wrong to say the BBC is killing professional journalism with free news because it's dying even faster in the US, where newspapers are shutting and local coverage is disappearing. The US already has a market-oriented news landscape.

The BBC seems free and public, but it is not free and the public influences it more through projected viewing and listening figures than with its votes. Leaving aside the question of whether it is good value or not, the BBC is funded by £142.50 from most families every year in the form of a separately collected tax on TV and computer ownership. Because it has a guaranteed income set by the government, the BBC isn't facing the same difficulties as the private parts of the mixed, public and private, British media system.

The huge BBC website isn't killing national or local papers; they have been in decline for decades. But the BBC does occupy a big part of the online space into which all media businesses must expand if they are to adapt to digital reproduction.

BBC news is funded by the licence fee payers but is rolled out across the global media landscape, free to some of its audiences online. Terrestrial, cable and satellite TV, Freesat and freeview all have competing private TV channels funded by subscriptions and/or advertising. All the accompanying news is either paid for by subscription or by advertisers, the costs being passed on to consumers of goods. And BBC TV, although available terrestrially and digitally to licence fee payers, is paid for again when received by subscribers to cable and satellite services. This is a very mixed market from which to extract funding for news.

Newspapers may be free or have a cover price, but they rely on advertising. The many news channels online, and online versions of newspapers, offer similar text-based news services that are free to users. News is expensive to make because you need professional journalists that have to be trained somewhere in the system and when privately owned news companies feel the pinch, they train less of them.

Murdoch's dad Rupert has said much of his newspapers' content will have to be paid for by users in the future. Although the technical difficulties of micropayment systems for news seem no nearer to being solved, this is interesting because news organisations have so far struggled to find advertisers to fund free news online or in print. Among the difficulties facing the ITV companies and Channel Four and Five is that advertisers may continue to spend less on broadcast in the future.

Murdoch Senior's long-range warning of charging for content suggests that it is both risky but, from his perspective, unavoidable.

Most content, including gaming, is free on the internet and business models in that medium reflect that. Many commentators echo points from Chris Anderson's book, Free; youngsters will just not pay for content they can download free. The very low cost of digital reproduction encouraged many organisations to put their content freely online, but they now have to find a way to make it pay. The BBC, of course, does not.

The internet is culturally very powerful because of its cooperative potential. So far, it has provided various free services that are then monetised by their providers being able to charge for related products and services or attract advertising. Users can buy currency and equipment for their gaming adventures, for example, and premium or professional versions of services such as Flickr, which can fund the whole concern if successful. Google takes ad revenue by click, encouraging more use and revenue by offering more and more free services.

Internet models of business or cooporation that have been exploited so far may be unsuitable for news. The Huffington Post could launch online without the expense of print reproduction and distribution, but it is a news brand now because of the demand in the market for its kind of professional reporting, not because it started as a website or blog.

News is the basic information that informs society what it knows about itself. It is the most constant, day-today, minute-to-minute experience of our public sphere. News organisations, however they are funded, must gain at least some respect for their role of informing the public about itself within the larger domain of what is discussed and contested throughout society. The practice of journalists, taken as a whole, must meet external standards of objectivity and authority regardless of how the news is funded.

That role of a free press can be supplemented by so-called citizen journalists, especially by their ability to digitally eye-witness events. But the free press simply cannot be replaced by them wholesale. A crowd sourced cloud of microviews from citizens is very interesting but it is not journalism, nor anything remotely resembling it.

The nineteenth and twentieth century business models that funded the newspapers and broadcast have faltered in the new era of many-to-many publishing, but the news itslef has no loss of function.

The many difficulties facing us today require a public engagement as never before, and there are creative possibilities for pooling expertise on the internet. However, the conciousness of the public is not informed by millions of little discussions. News is intrinsically incapable of becoming a huge process of trial and mostly error. News organisations, in their plurality, can only expand and step up to play the role of a free press if the professional standards that the public expects of news are maintained by training journalists and sending them out to work. Someone has to pay for the news.

If we assume news could be free, who will make it? Who will bother to read it and would it still really be news? To have a US-style market place would be a culture shock in Britain, but a monoculture of Beeb would be equally bad.

Everyone agrees on a free press but no one wants to pay for it. Hard news is never going to be mined for the multitude freely. Taxes like the licence fee or profits from selling news are currently the only two ways to fund a democratically vital journalism. It is sensible to exploit both funding models rather than have a phony "public" verses "private" debate.