Slashdot Mirror
Google Will Star In New Dow Jones News Model
An anonymous reader writes "Dow Jones is getting set to launch a new aggregator, akin to Google News, which will charge Web users for access to high-quality journalism. 'The Journal is one of the many newspapers you might buy in one place and with one payment [...] Watch for it,' said Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton. However, rather than posing a threat to Google News, Andrew Keen, author and entrepreneur, says the aggregator will use Google as a critical partner. The only people who should be worried about this new model, says Keen, 'are all those lucky consumers who, over the last 15 years, have been getting their news for free.'"
Someone tell MSNBC, CNN, and Foxnews they're no longer viable.
Hey, all you people getting value for free, you'd better watch out! You have to pay us now... for what you already get for free! Take that!
This guy must have been top of his class in Business School. I will follow his career with much interest.
It's about time something like this happened. I am sick of hearing all the talk from newspapers about how evil the Internet is because they can't sell papers anymore, now maybe that they have finally decided to use a payment method for online news they will shut up. Will I actually pay for any of it? Probably not, I don't care that much about the type of news that is always reported in physical papers and there are plenty resources for science and tech news around that are not as concerned with the bottom line as the Dow Jones.
Maybe the public should start charging for making the news? Those damn newsies having been leeching off the deeds and misdeeds of the ordinary public from the beginning. Why should they get our stories for free? If it wasn't for us, the news would just be bad fiction printed on cheap paper. We should go on strike. No one do anything newsworthy for a week. That'll teach 'em!
Does high-quality journalism even exist anymore?
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
I don't think Dow Jones is targeting the average consumer, but are targeting higher-end financial consumers, investors, financial advisers, etc. Maybe they are mostly "old" people ;)
In the financial world, there are still plenty of vendors who charge for their content-- Barron's, financial newsletters, Bloomberg's "Professional" news products, etc.
Overall, these vendors generally (But not always) provide good-quality, in-depth articles and opinions. People will read their copy of Barron's like a student reads a book, complete with bookmarks and highlighters.
While the free sites are cheap, many of the news sites are filled with noise, the forums are filled with scams (The comments at finance.google.com are entertaining to read).
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
News will now remain free. If the major providers put their shit behind pay-walls, one of two things will happen:
1) There's already a thriving eco-system of ad-financed blogs and other sites that basically do nothing but sift through, reword and extensively "quote" the stuff behind the login-prompts. These sites will just get bigger and stronger, eventually hiring more of their own staff. Since that's 90% of what traditional newspapers have been doing since the dawn of time, there is more than enough precedent for this business model.
2) If the going get's really tough, Wikinews or some other major non-profit payer will become as hugely popular as Wikipedia is now. If Britannica or Brockhaus had made all their content available for free under a reasonably license for personal use, Wikipedia would probably not be where it is now.
I've tended to roll my eyes at the newspapers whining about Google "stealing" their content. Changing their robots.txt is all it takes to keep Google's filthy little mits off their precious news sites. Of course, that also kills all of the free traffic the Google drives to their site--and pay wall or no, no readers means no ad views, clicks, and subscriptions.
Now . . . what exactly is this new model being proposed? Letting Google aggregate all the little news snippets and blurbs, but funneling all that traffic to a bigger walled garden containing multiple publications for a single fee is what this sounds like. If they get enough people on board, it might work. Or it might go the way of most non-porn paysites on the Internet and fail miserably. (My money's still on the "fail miserably" end result. I'm not seeing what's so terribly innovative about this.)
Newsgathering costs money, sure. And there should be ways of making that money. But it's going to take a bit more cleverness on the newspaper's parts than simply publishing online behind a pay wall. If they can't figure that out, then they deserve to fail and be replaced with something that does figure it out.