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Murdoch Says, "We'll Charge For All Our Sites"
Oracle Goddess writes "In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide, Rupert Murdoch announced that his media giant News Corporation Ltd intends to charge for all its news websites in a bid to lift revenues, as the transition towards online media permanently changes the advertising landscape. 'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made content free. Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites,' Murdoch said."
N/T
It proves nothing. You can call a rose,a rose; and a pig, a pig; without being one your self. The history of Fox news is documented even in court cases...
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Does The Sun content really count as news?
Silly Americans with their "right wing" vs "left wing" so-called political opinions...
Nothing in real life is black or white, it's always shades of grey.
Assume there is a median political position. To the left and right of this are various stances. "Left" politics include civil libertarianism, entitlements for minorities and the working class, and regulation of business; "right" politics generally imply the opposite. Between far left and far right, there are still "shades of grey" as you call them: left, center left, center right, and right.
It's possible to be left on some issues and right on others. For instance, the Libertarian Party is left on civil libertarianism but right on entitlements and business regulation. But U.S. political parties whose platforms mix "left" and "right" planks virtually never win more than 2% of the popular vote. Perhaps a better analogy isn't "shades of grey" as much as color vs. grayscale.
Used to subscribe to WSJ because I thought the quality was hard to beat. Canceled after far too many articles that were far too self-serving to Murdoch. Then there is Fox News... and...
Far too out of touch. News Corp is completely lost.
You want to find the truth? Research it for yourself instead of reporting on whatever is said by whoever you tend to agree with.
If only Fox viewers would do this. And if only they would start here.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made content free.
Yes, it has.
Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites,' Murdoch said."
..but will anyone pay for it? That would truly be news.
It he is modeling the sites after the Wall Street Journal's pay scheme, then he wouldn't have gotten a penny anyways from you. The WSJ is mostly free as it stands. The subscriptions give you access to catagory indexing of older articles, a list of articles going back 90 days, access to the Europe and Asia versions and so on. Most all of the major political and international news stories are and will be free for a limited time if the WJS model is implemented.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/americas/03iht-journalists.1.19890938.html
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Er, just to be 100% clear, marketwatch.com is the best ONLINE business/market news source, and it's owned by news corp
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
The theory is that US citizens should be able to figure out for themselves whether what they're watching is news or editorial content, as opposed to having government regulators step in and control the press.
I'm still not sure how well that's worked out for us, though.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Yes, Fox News has a pretty large viewership (I would guess that CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are approximately evenly split, but I don't watch any of them so I don't care enough to dig up any numbers), and yes, your assessment is fairly accurate. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly are probably the most well-known Fox News personalities, and they're all extreme ideologues (Beck also has the bonus feature of being completely fucking nuts). If you want a nice Best Of Fox News review, I recommend watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; while they'll still make fun of CNN (which seems to have become just a reading of Twitter messages from viewers) and MSNBC (which is almost as ideological as Fox News, but they generally manage to hide the crazy better), Fox News provides by far the most entertaining clips.
My opinion: different opinions than me
than I????
The problem with one site charging an access fee and another not charging is that no one will pay when they can get something similar for free. Unless more sites or at least a critical mass work together, any charging plans won't work. The fact that everyone knows this purposed charging model won't work by itself indicates to me that there is more than likely some collusion going on with other major news players and we will hear similar announcements from others soon as well. If there was no secret talks, maybe his FY10 implementation date is testing the waters to see if the others will follow without technically working with directly with them to game the system.
Newspaper publishers had talks about doing the same thing earlier this year. See here and here for details.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Over here in Australia Murdoch will happily tell you his worldview is expressed through his media, why not it's his media?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
His ace is that he can potentially charge less for advertising if he gets loyal Fox viewers/readers to subscribe. Advertising revenues are down, and advertisers are looking for better deals.
The other problem with all this is that it assumes that the problem newspapers are having with revenue is caused by the cannibalisation of the print editions by the online editions. I understand, although I cannot provide evidence, that the real problem is that the classified market has gone away. The newspapers lunch got eaten by eBay and Craigslist, not cannibalised by their own online offerings. And if this is true, then raising prices for consumers might increase revenue, but it wont return it to where it was.
The importance of the decline in classified advertising is usually overlooked by people discussing how the Internet has affected newspaper economics. It's easy to see how putting stories on the Internet for free might cannabalize the print edition, but the collapse of classfied advertising has played an even bigger role.
In the 90's the dominant newspaper in a major market like the Boston Globe might earn 40% or more of its revenues from classifieds, and most of that revenue came from two sources, auto dealers and real estate agents. Nowadays if I want to buy a used car or a home, I'd start online at cars.com or one of the now-ubiquitous real estate agency sites linked to the Multiple Listing Service. A three-line classified ad for a home can hardly compare to a virtual "tour" of the house via the Internet. Moreover you can now get an enormous amount of information about a home in advance (property taxes, original purchase price, "comps") on the Internetn that was previously invisible when homes were sold in newspapers. Around the turn of the century, the Fox-owned Boston Herald took a run at the Globe's near monopoly on classifieds by trying to entice car dealers to make the Herald their primary classified outlet. Today that strategy would make no sense whatsoever.
I can only see subscription models working for the most prestigious papers like the WSJ or perhaps the Times. I think the future for most smaller-market papers is a bleak one.
the claims from Limbaugh and his ilk that she's some kind of raging liberal fanatic are really just poorly masked sexism.
I'm not going to defend Limbaugh from an accusation of sexism. However Limbaugh and his ilk claim every prominent Democrat is a raging liberal fanatic. Every Democratic candidate for President is "the most liberal candidate EVAR!" It's just a standard smear designed to take advantage of a demographic who thinks "liberal" is a dirty word and who will be appropriately terrified of "the most liberal" and really has nothing to do with the individual in question, other than that they're a Democrat who Rush thinks needs to be taken down.
The enemies of Democracy are
Any biography of W you will find clearly tracks that he got in to the Texas Air National Guard using family connections to dodge the draft in Vietnam. He was, trained at great expense to fly obsolete jets that would never get sent to Vietnam. The Texas Air National Guard was designed for rich kids to dodge the draft, because they could become fighter jocks without any risk of seeing combat.
In the middle of his guard duty he moved to Alabama to work on a political campaign, and anecdotally party hard, though the evidence of his partying and drug use is he said, she said so you can't prove it either. It appears he did no guard duty while he was there. After that he headed to Harvard to get his MBA still before his Texas guard duty was over. You can't nail him for it because there is no documentation left in his Texas Guard files any more in how he managed to use Guard duty to get duck the draft, but fulfilled none of the obligations once he bolted Texas, and suffered no consequence.
As I said it is a weird case you will only find with the rich and powerful. It is clear from well established biography he didn't finish his guard service, he suffered no repercussions for deserting his guard service and there is no documentation on what happened or how he got away with it. It is pretty clear once he ducked his guard service he should have been prosecuted or drafted but wasn't.
So its not really bias to try to expose this sordid history of Bush, especially after he sent hundreds of thousands of Americans off to an optional war in Iraq, when he himself was for all practical purposes a draft dodger and deserter. Rather's team was just in a Catch-22, they knew the story to be true, but they also knew there was no way to prove it.
@de_machina
Dude CBS fired him for it...... get it..... bias punished.
Can you cite any case where Fox punished one of its reporters for lying. The most famous case of Fox and lying was Jane Akre. Fox tried to force her to lie on air about a Monsanto drug for dairy cows and when she refused Fox fired her. Fox won the appeal when the court determined it was OK for Fox to intentionally falsify the news. There is an FCC policy against lying in the news but.... but its only a policy, so Fox can do it all they want according to the appeals court, so apparently they do.
Do you just not get the difference. CBS did the ethical thing and fired the people responsible for bias. Fox on the other hand waged a lengthy court battle to defend its right to knowingly lie in their news casts.
I feel for the CBS team though. I dearly wish they HAD swayed the election because as bad as Kerry sucked, the last four years of Bush were almost certainly worse. Exactly how many cases of election manipulation did the Bush machine perpetrate that were MUCH worse than the CBS case. They ruthlessly destroyed John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 using a false story that he fathered a colored child. They did some pretty tacky things to block a recount in Florida in 2000, and they "Swift boated" Kerry. At this point "Swift Boating" is synonymous with voter manipulation. They managed to make someone who actually served in combat in Vietnam look bad versus Bush and Cheney who both dodged the draft and sat out Vietnam partying in the U.S.
@de_machina
Here is Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, on W:
"Ironically, just at the time we needed to accelerate to remain competitive in 2000, we elected the worst president in history. He not only focused on all the wrong things -- starting wars, religious bigotry and zealotry, letting the financial system go unregulated, etc. -- he cut R&D funding for science and technology. Thanks largely to our insipid political leaders, we stalled for eight of the most important years in the past 100. The U.S. is resilient, but this is a lot to overcome. The world is pretty uniformly covered with smart people -- we have no patent on that. And with the Web/Internet now enabling them to learn and grow just as rapidly as us, we are far worse off now than we were in 2000."
You seriously underestimate the power the executive has in the U.S. The Executive controls ALL of the federal regulatory agencies. When Bush came to office he put right wing idealogues who hated government, IN CHARGE OF THE GOVERMENT. Their qualifications were usually based on campaign and religous credentials, not on qualification for the position. You don't put people who hate government in CHARGE of government unless you want a catastrophe which is what he got.
The instances of catastrophic failure that resulted are too numerous to list:
- FEMA director incompetent and New Orleans goes a week with little relief after Katrina
- EPA/NASA among others forced to altar positions on global warming
- DOJ was nearly destroyed by putting unqualified people in professional civil service jobs because they were loyal Republicans and born again, and Gonzales being appointed Attorney General finished the devastation
- SEC was completely disfunctional as a major financial crisis developed especially under Chrisopher Cox who was a rabid "free marketeer"
- R&D funding gutted
- FDA started working for the companies instead of regulating them and we now have a raft of unsafe foods and drugs
- NSA turned to spy on American citizens
- CIA turned in to an agency of torturers and law breakers. Also and agency humiliated by blessing an Iraq when there were no WMD's and no links to Al Qaeda
@de_machina