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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[ben0207]

Your neighbour sounds like a dick.

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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[geekoid]

You should check out public broadcasting.

PBS does some great news pieces.

Here in Oregon, OPB is excellent.

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.

[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.

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.

[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.

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,

[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?

And...

[Stormwatch]

...nothing of value was lost.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

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: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

[Darkness404]

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

No Spin Zone...

[dmartine40]

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

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

HHGTG

[Falconhell]

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

"And whom will that inconveience"

Too much choice

[unreadepitaph]

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

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:This is a good thing

[taucross]

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

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:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[Psyborgue]

People that labels themselves and refuse to consider those they disagree are competent are lemmings.

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?

[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: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.

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.

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:This is a good thing

[binary paladin]

As I always say, "There's no reason both sides can't be completely wrong."

Re:Hello alternative media

[Cyner]

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

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: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.

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: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!

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.

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.

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:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo?

[Flere Imsaho]

People who generalise suck.

Oh, wait...

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

[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: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: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.

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

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.

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."

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