Alma Media’s CEO Kai Telanne is convinced that the days of free online news content are numbered. In an interview with the National Coalition party organ Verkkouutiset, he said that in future more and more newspapers will charge readers for online content.

“The content has to be of high enough quality that consumers are willing to pay for it, irrespective of the medium or channel through which the content is consumed,” Telanne said.

Telanne does not think that Finland’s commercial media players will collaborate on a common approach.

“Someone’s bound to give a paywall a go, and if it works out, the competitors will be only too happy to follow their lead.”

Elsewhere in the world, the multinational News Corporation – owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch – has placed its online content behind a paywall. Whether this can be deemed a success, however, remains to be seen: Britain’s The Times, which belongs to the News Corporation family, lost the bulk of its online readership after erecting a paywall at the beginning of July.

Telanne predicts that in future newspapers will increasingly be read on electronic reading devices such as Apple’s iPad or Amazon’s Kindle. The iPad is scheduled to arrive in Finland this autumn. Worldwide sales of reading devices have grown at an exponential rate this year.

“From the perspective of newspapers, there’s nothing necessary about the current practice of printing our content on yellow paper. It could just as well be brought to readers via various reading devices and other technology,” Telanne notes. He believes hard-copy newspapers will still be read ten years from now, but at the same time, content will be more diverse and designed for other media, too.

So far it appears that the Jyväskylä-based daily Keskisuomalainen will be the first in Finland to place a significant proportion of its online content behind a paywall in early 2011.

Alma Media holds the second largest stake in the Finnish News Agency (STT).

HT