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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."
That's one way to ensure nobody reads his stuff.
...nothing of value was lost.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I think it's really quite sad that Rupert Murdoch thinks this will work, given the number of quality, professional news sources online that are free.
I think Rupert's eying the success of the Wall Street Journal as an online subscription site a little too much. What works for the WSJ won't work for other papers, IMO.
Well. It might be a decent business plan. He might gain more money but less readership. Long term, i'm not sure that's such a good strategy but in the short term it might work just fine. Ad revenue can't be that good.
I'm going to predict that this will work.
Who cares about how many hits you have, when the real key is profitability. The WSJ is pretty good online and its worth the subscription.
Obviously Fox News's site is a different animal but if you just had a Fox media site with reporting that was real, it could work.
But for that to happen, you have to give people content they are willing to pay for, and that means that Murdoch has to invest in journalism if he wants people to pay for it.
Technologically, what the media needs is a micro-payments system setup so that you can have a single billing identity that lets you get all the stories... it would cover Fox, CBS, etc, and a bunch of news sites.
This is my sig.
Because a sheep-like mentality is limited to the right wing only?
The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep or assume that they're not intelligent.
"In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide..." Is it possible to mod a story submission as flamebait?
The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep or assume that they're not intelligent.
No... here let me help you...
The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep and then put them all in ovens.
Are you implying Rupert Murdoch cares what Jesus says? Rupert was probably one of the guys that got chased from the temple.
Murdoch bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Not such a hot property these days. I wouldn't put any money into Murdoch's internet instincts.
It seems that, despite (or rather, because of) Murdoch's strangehold on your media, most people really don't understand the megabadness of Murdoch.
I know, I know, soooo 20th Century... so I'll boil it down for you geeks: You know the Jedi Emperor? Murdoch doesn't just look like that guy - in the cast of malignities afflicting the planet, he *is* that guy.
Google for more. You'll be surprised what you didn't know about old Rupe.
you had me at #!
People that labels themselves and refuse to consider those they disagree are competent are lemmings.
Translation: "We have too much traffic on our websites so plans are in place to drop that volume of visitors dramatically."
Online news has been stuck in a prisoner's dilemma situation (from their POV). If everyone charged for news, then they'd be OK. When only some people charge for news, those that charge lose their audience. That drives the system to the equilibrium of noone charging for news. From the consumer's POV this is a good thing.
Because Murdoch owns so much of the news, he might be able to break out of the current poor (for newspaper publishers) equilibrium. Of course, if he can do so then he's pretty much demonstrated that he has enough of a monopoly that market power isn't working. There would be evidence for an anti-trust case against him.
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.
Dan Rather: "Fake but accurate."
A pithy summary for a document that no one for a moment disputed was false based on its contents.
You're just another shill who has a bent, nothing more and nothing less. Take off the rose colored glasses, and stop pretending that only one part of the media manipulates.
The mainstream broadcast media has their problems, and certainly biases, but nobody else in broadcast media working on an out-and-out agenda at the scale that Fox works.
Tweet, tweet.
Maybe you can get that from a typical hosting company, who oversells their capacity and bet that nobody uses even a fraction of it and who has one administrator for a whole low rent data center... But real servers (dedicated servers, not virtuals crammed 100 to a box), full capacity pipes, and dedicated administrators with a triple nine data center cost considerably more.
On top of which, you conveniently forgot the cost of providing content - which isn't cheap.
What is utterly mind boggling about this announcement is that it is being applied uniformly across a huge spectrum of publications with wildly different readerships and usage patterns. I understand the desire and need to find the ways to monetize news investigation, reporting, analysis and gossip, and concede that they way things are being done now may not be the best. But does Murdoch really believe that what works for Wall Street Journal the will work for The Sun?
Seriously. The "blogosphere" may not create much usefull content in and of itself but it is an increadable tool for redirecting visitors to content and for providing discussion on that content. If you setup a paywall, you block yourself out of that market and the ad revenue it generates. For some publications it probably won't matter. For those that thrive on discussion and gossip it will matter dearly. If Murdoch can't understand the difference then he needs to retire.
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works.
That's not the way the world works *currently*. But, prior to the last few years information *was* free; people only had to pay for distribution of that information (and, hence, the invention of the "newspaper"). Now, we have an insanely cheap technology for distribution and the old guard are trying to change the model to pay-for-information without anyone noticing.
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works. Toss em out -you wont need masses of readers anymore to support ad revenue- and let us pay you a fair price for the service you tender. Why would someone even think that they would make their newspapers available for free? Is this some kind of base assumption we run on that everything on the internet should be free and we just flush the bills down the toilet? What's happening is they incur cost producing Content and then they give it away for free. What kind of crazy business model is that, you make NO PROFIT. Strip off all this advertising crap. Charge for premium content. Turn the web into a real, competitive marketplace. We can dig deeper so only for actual content and services by the way
So what you're saying is that we should put you in the category of people that just don't get it?
I can't speak for anyone but myself but:
I don't expect newspapers to be available for free on the internet--at least I don't expect anything that resembles the sunday print edition of the NYT to be there for free. The problem is that there is no effective way to charge for them the way there is for physical newspapers. Sure you can do authenticated logins and accounts--but all you've done is made electronic versions of the old way of doing it, and nothing has changed then. In fact, it is a step backwards for the flow of information if you could actually make that work--no more borrowing the paper from the guy in the next cubicle. So what you seem to be advocating is a move to a world with even less freedom of information than we had two decades ago.
The internet is designed to move information from place to place as cheaply as possible. Trying to artificially inflate the price won't work. We can't make computers that aren't good at copying information (they wouldn't be computers then).
I don't know what business model they should come up with. There might not be one, period. Oh well. There wasn't one before the printing press either. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Buggy makes don't have a business model anymore, neither do the people who made player-piano rolls. Nor flint-lock manufacturers. There's a ton of Benedictian monks out of work thanks to the printing press. Just try finding someone to make a good Roman piss-pot for you these days.
What I don't understand is why you think it is a bad thing that this might happen. The de-corporatization of news media is the BEST possible thing that could happen to this country right now. We should not be looking for ways to preserve corporate control of information.
How can a newspaper mogul not understand about ad supported content? Most of the cost of a newspaper is ads. You really think fifty cents a copy pays for content, printing and distribution?
Similarly how can he not understand about supply and demand? His competitors are not other newspapers who try to adopt the same business model. His competitors are the free, ad-supported news services. On a level playing field, they'll eat him alive.
I can't believe he's this stupid, so he must think he has an ace up his sleeve. And the only ace I can think of in this case is government intervention.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
As much as I dislike the content that fox news reports as news. I will stand and fight for their right to do so as given by the constitution for a very good reason. You can't have freedom of the press on one hand, and then demand they conform to what you deem to be the truth, no matter how correct you may be on what the truth is. Yes I wish that people in general were smarter and would try to verify their ramblings, and look past the talk, but life is what it is. I also wish that we had a news station more like the Daily Show in format, at least then we could have some actual rebuttal to some of the more flagrant biases. While I realize that the Daily Show is purely a comedy show, it is a constant dissapointment to me how they are generally much better at reporting accurate news than the news stations themselves.
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works. Toss em out -you wont need masses of readers anymore to support ad revenue- and let us pay you a fair price for the service you tender. Why would someone even think that they would make their newspapers available for free? Is this some kind of base assumption we run on that everything on the internet should be free and we just flush the bills down the toilet? What's happening is they incur cost producing Content and then they give it away for free. What kind of crazy business model is that, you make NO PROFIT. Strip off all this advertising crap. Charge for premium content. Turn the web into a real, competitive marketplace. We can dig deeper so only for actual content and services by the way
You missed my point totally mate. When I buy a newspaper, I am paying for someone to chop down trees, someone to make ink, someone to run huge sheets of paper through huge machines that print on them, then fold them, then deliver them to newsagents, and each person has to make a dollar.
That's fine. Well, actually it's NOT. I stopped buying newspapers a long time ago because I found that I was only interested in one or two stories in an entire newspaper. Those one or two stories were generally covered online by the sites that I visit on a regular basis. So, I stopped buying newspapers. I am one of the people that falls into the stopped buying newspapers, turned to the internet group.
What Mr Rupert seems to be totally MISSING which is the point I am making is that should he put the SAME content on the internet that he puts into the printed version, I am STILL NOT INTERESTED in paying for it. Possibly less so.
Just because I stopped buying a newspaper and get things off the net doesn't mean I will start buying a newspaper just because it's available online.
What compounds this even more is that he is investing probably millions of dollars into a multi-billion dollar business and he seems to be missing this simple point.
Do I expect a whole newspaper of content for free online in one place with no ads? Nope.
Can I always get the two or three things I am interested in from either sites like Slashdot for free in the detail that I want? Yes.
I think a lot of newspapers and media that previously sold very large volumes better start telling shareholders that they are going to face a serious decline in readership and profits due to the availability of small snippets of information on the internet. The glory days of ALL PRINT MEDIA are GONE. Finished. They won't be reborn with a new fee on a website.
Now do you get it?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Newspapers are not free, books are not free, movies are not free. All these mediums have people behind them. People like you that like to eat. To buy clothes. To ensure their kids have a great Christmas.
... and the same was true with buggywhip manufacturers, and telephone operators who manually connected every phone call, and GM. Why should I have to bail them, or you, out?
I hate this analogy, and Slashdot is absolutely the worst proponent of it.
Buggywhip manufacturers, manual telephone switch operators, monks who manually copied documents, etc., all lost their jobs because they no longer added value to society and/or their employers. No one needed buggywhips when cars supplanted horse-drawn carriages, no one needed a person to switch calls if a computer could do it faster and cheaper, and no one needed monks to manually copied documents when the printing press could do it faster and cheaper. That all makes sense.
The analogy fails for media because people still want media, and still want media to be created by media creators (writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc.). In other words, the media creators still add value to society and/or their employer. The media's value is in its creation, not in its distribution.
And as everyone loves to point out, distribution costs can go to $0 or close to it...but creation costs do not. You still have to pay writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc., to create the media. If you choose not to pay your media creators, then you end up with amateurs recording home movies of their cats doing stupid things and uploading them to YouTube. Which has yet to make a profit for anyone.
So, no, news and reporters are not on par with monks who copied documents thousands of years ago. They are reporting news, and there is still value in, and demand for, that.
Translation: "We have too much traffic on our websites so plans are in place to drop that volume of visitors dramatically."
Good, because I'm sick and tired of only having "mass appealing" news to read. Bullshit stories that only attract visitors, looking for something "astonishing", in order to gain ad exposure. News today is free for one reason, because it's fucking worthless. If someone is able to provide a proper news service, yet to be seen since the internet era, with proper journalists I would be happy to pay for the service. But to pay for bullshit headlines and ridiculous stories, no thank you.
I am the lawn!
Maybe they should do some research into ads that don't make me want to kick puppies.
Ezekiel 23:20
Your argument does not address the one important factor that will keep good news sources alive - quality. Sure, any random blogger or independent journalist can write about the news, but newspapers and large news sites don't just publish news, they edit and check it (at least in theory).
No they don't, and if you think they do you are living in a fairy tale. Time and time again over the last decade it has been made clear that they do not do this. They quote wikipedia in their articles, take corporate/political press releases at face value/unquestioningly, and get humiliated by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).
Take Slashdot, for example. The stories are submitted by non-journalists and checked/edited by non-journalists, and the result is many a biased headline or summary
Yup. And in my experience it's still higher quality than any newspaper article. I have NEVER seen an accurate newspaper article on a subject I was conversant in. Not once. Which leads me to believe they're equally worthless on subjects I'm not conversant in as well.
Journalists are rarely qualified to understand the subjects they report on, so journalism is little more than the ability to write pyramid-style articles that fit the column width and stick to a 'so-and-so said.....' formula. The only thing you can trust is that so-and-so said that, and that is on a good day.
At least with the BBC you can be reasonably sure they checked their facts and tried to present it in a more or less neutral way.
Again, only if you're living in a fantasy.
The problem Murdoch has is that his papers are not much better than the random blogger, or maybe even worse as they systematically distort the truth. People are cottoning on to this and can now easily seek out better news sources.
Murdoch's papers are not any worse than the average.
Your post is EXACTLY part of the problem, IMO. If people didn't have this bullshit hallucination that Old Media actually does anything of value anymore, we'd be a lot better off. Seriously, listening to people delude themselves with this crap--it's like there's a cult of Isis or something--it's that anachronistic.
>>>An informed citizenry is essential for a healthy democracy.
And having newspapers that are controlled by a wealthy megacorp oligarchy is the exact opposite of that. News is better when it's controlled by tens of thousands of independent individuals, each providing a different viewpoint, than when it's controlled centrally.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I have NEVER seen an accurate newspaper article on a subject I was conversant in. Not once. Which leads me to believe they're equally worthless on subjects I'm not conversant in as well.
Michael Crichton says something similar (though you have shown yourself to be an exception) in his speech Why Speculate ?.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
"That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
"But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."
Squirrel!
>the Times (or, for non-Brits, the London Times) is a serious newspaper
This would be the newspaper that claimed public interest in revealing the identity of the anonymous police blogger, stopping his inside information from seeing the light of day and reaching the public, yes?
The Times at one time was not owned by Murdoch. It was a serious newspaper. He bought it and the rot began.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
At least now FOX provides the alternate "we need less government" viewpoint.
How? The last time I saw FOX News, they were talking about some racist that shimmied up a flag pole and ripped down a Mexican flag outside of a Mexican restaurant because it was flying above the American flag. They wanted laws in acted so that would be illegal to fly another country's flag higher than America's (this was a year ago, I don't live in America and only go back once a year).
To me, that's worse than trying to nationalize health care or social security or whatever beneficial program that they rave against. When I hear "less government" I always think it means getting rid of the nanny state (drug laws, forcing ID in science classes, making a law on how you have to fly your flags, keeping gay marriage illegal), unfortunately, the people spouting on about "less government" just want it out of the way so their greedy asses can rob people without being bothered (Enron et al.).
Give me someone that wants to get government out of my life, not out of my pocket.