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."

Comments

What a nice gift to progressives

[bl968]

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.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Uber Banker]

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.

I often see how independent small publishers break stories, only for larger organisations to source from, but not attribute their source, several days later. This is especially true of quality blogs and online communities in niche interest or geographical areas - I run one of these. Not attributing and mandatory charging for a derivative work is not good form.

I would like to know the IP range that Murdoch companies use, in order to block them from my content.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[demachina]

No argument there are all kinds of biases around but you are making a pretty weak argument defending Fox on that basisc because their bias is OFF THE SCALE.

In the left bias case you cite Rather was FIRED for that one story. Kind of says CBS applied some standards and ethics that were a LOT tougher than Fox which intentionally broadcasts false information, is proud of it, and would never fire one of their talking heads for lying as long as the lies are the Murdouch/Ailes/Rove/Cheney approved lies.

The Rather case was also not something you can claim as serious bias. The fact is everyone knows Bush deserted his guard service, possible to avoid drug testing in his flight physical because he was a heavy cocaine user at the time. The guard commander's secretary said what was in the letter was pretty plausible.

The problem with the Bush case is due to the power of his family in Texas and especially when he was governor of Texas(and commander in chief of the Texas Guard) all the incriminating stuff in his guard file was almost certainly destroyed by his operatives. You have this ugly case where Bush did something bad bordering on criminal and got away with it because his family is rich and powerful. You can't exactly blame Rather's team for wanting to nail Bush for deserting his guard duty which he certainly did. They, like everyone else in the world with a brain, didn't want to see that loser get another four years. It was a desire proved justified because by the end of his second term Bush and Co. had nearly destroyed the U.S. and everyone, including many Republicans, realized too late what a complete disaster Bush's reign was for the country.

W's eight years in power may well have ended America's ascendancy and may have started a decline which may prove irreversible.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Fluffeh]

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.

Re:Fox News

[mjwx]

At least Fox News will still be free.

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).