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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."
Fox News and the other Rupert Murdoch properties charging for access is the best thing the Dems and Obama could ask for. It will limit the reach of the biased news content put out by his properties and limit the public exposure. Also as a publisher of a small Online Community Newspaper, I hope that Gannett and the other big news publishing companies follow suit. It's win win for me.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Translation: "We have too much traffic on our websites so plans are in place to drop that volume of visitors dramatically."
I think a better translation would be:
Steve (Assistant): Mr Murdoch, the Chief Financial Officer is looking at your numbers. He isn't happy at the moment.
Rupert: Well Steve, it's like this, We have this thing that makes us lots of money, but it's going up the clapper now, and we have this other thing, that no-one really understands here, and all the senior management executive reports show that if all of our customers payed for it, it would be grand, so lets do that. I am sure that the people on this interweb thing can afford it. Good job Steve, lets go out for a team lunch... Oh, also, Steve, can you download this internet for me? My kids say they can't download stuff at home cause it's too slow.
Steve: Ummm, sir? Download the internet?
Rupert: Yes! Download it, anything to stop my kids whinging when I come home.
Steve: Ummm, okay, sure.
Rupert: Great, also, can you schedule a meeting later with the board? I need to discuss how we will be investing all this new interweb money that we will be making.
Or something like that. Loads of people simply don't get the internet, I deal with them all the time here when I am presenting to senior management meetings. They know it's SOMETHING. They know that MONEY passes through it, they think that just because they do SOMETHING on this place with MONEY, they will make some of it themselves. It's the old-school business mentality coming head to head with something to revolutionary that many of the older chaps (as good at business as they are) simply don't comprehend or have enough smarts to make sense of. It's so vastly different to ANYTHING they have dealt with in the years they have been in business.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
As a side note, do USian's really watch fox news?
Forgive the cultural ignorance but as an Australia I'd never seen anything like Fox News before seeing it in Thailand. I watched it for about 1/2 an hour whilst sitting in a bar and there was not a shred of actual news on there all it seemed to be was scaremongering about Obama and the democrats. I'd be a bit less confused if they were using facts or at least logical conjecture but they were blaming Obama for the economic problems that started in the Bush administration and threw around the words "communist" or "socialism" at least once a sentence. I believe the report was on how Obama was destroying the country by Greta someone (cant remember, had hangover).
It was such blatant and obvious propaganda that eventually I had to ask the bar staff to change the channel (ended up with the Thai soap channel, at least that made the bar staff happy). Was my experience typical of Fox News? Fair enough I only saw about 30 minutes of it, I could have caught the "republican hour of power" without knowing but the channel is called Fox News not Fox Editorials, I kind of expected some news.
In Australia this wouldn't be permitted under the broadcasters or advertisers code of conduct. News must contain news, editorials must be in a separate program and may never be advertised as news (they call them "Current Affairs" programs and typically start right after the news).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Murdoch doesn't give a shit, it just happens that a lot of idiots buy into nationalistic sensationalism, so he sells them what they want. In the UK the sun isn't too bad compared to the mail and is more left wing than the telegraph, the (london) times and thelondonpaper arn't particularity bad either. Over here the colbert report goes out on fx, so the idea that murdoch and his nth wife sit down and tell fox news to spread right wing bullshit is pretty dumb, he just sells "news" to the lowest common denominator, he doesn't really care who's in power he's fucking loaded anyway!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He isn't.
News Corp has deep pockets and a wealth of profit-making websites.
He understands it would be suicide for his readership of his newspapers if he charged for access, but rivals didn't.
It would be a slightly slower suicide if he charged nothing at all.
So perhaps his plan is this:
1. Charge for access to all his news sites.
2. Encourage rivals to charge also (it has been already flagged that newspapers are willing to work as a bloc on this issue).
3. Watch while readership plunges at all newspaper websites following the introduction of pay-per-view.
4. Hold out until his major rivals are all broke.
5. Maintain a cost for viewing online publications
6. Close down newspaper print editions as readers migrate to paying for content online
7. Scoop up profits and increase influence
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
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.
Another way is for the ISP's to bundle access to pay websites with internet access - and maybe offer tiers of access; similar to cable.
You've also pointed out one problem with electronic distribution - it's less convenient to share; I can't give my electronic WSJ to a friend or share it with someone, it's tied to me and my compute.
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.
You are correct in pointing out that the internet is merely a distribution system, and just like the printing press changed how news was distributed which gave rise to the concept of the "press" as a profession. As people became more literate, newstands and corner newspapers replaced the town criers as the source of information. The distribution system is separate from the content; but it does not replace the underlying service provided. While a cheaper distribution system lessens part of the costs it doesn't remove the cost of producing the content.
Prior to the printing press news was collected and recorded by hand and only the wealthy could afford hard copies; that business model evolved as mass production became easier and more people were capable of reading.
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.
In each case, technology created a new way of accomplishing the same fundamental tasks as cars replaced buggies, the gramophone replaced the player piano, and repeating rifle replaced the flintlock. People still pay for the new technology because it fulfills a need.
The Benedictines did not cease to exist; they moved on to other things.
For some reason, people assume the new technology is a game changer and the old rules no longer apply; while technology certainly changes the environment and gives rise to many new ways of doing things; it's still the old needs and desires being satisfied in a different way.
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.
The problem is not with the corporations being replaced; it's that the essential function of a news gathering organization - reporting facts and providing informed commentary - is being replaced with a vast sea of information of greatly varying amounts of accuracy and that is often designed to push a certain POV and as such ignores anything that does not agree to that POV.
As a result, the value of that information has dropped dramatically an
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
This is high debatable. The problem is that some of the viewpoints that people are passionate about (and create tons of web pages/blogs/feeds about) are simply *wrong*. Not everything has two sides, and having to try and figure out the bullshit from the sanity is beyond the capabilities (and time) of most people. Sorry folks, but
You'll find thousands of independent individuals with blogs that say otherwise. Without some relatively neutral individual calling them out (or beating the crap out of them, ala Buzz Aldrin) they'll take in a lot of people who are simply too gullible or uninformed to know better.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"