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Murdoch Says, "We'll Charge For All Our Sites"
Oracle Goddess writes "In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide, Rupert Murdoch announced that his media giant News Corporation Ltd intends to charge for all its news websites in a bid to lift revenues, as the transition towards online media permanently changes the advertising landscape. 'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made content free. Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites,' Murdoch said."
N/T
That's one way to ensure nobody reads his stuff.
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.
...nothing of value was lost.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Fox News and the other Rupert Murdoch properties charging for access is the best thing the Dems and Obama could ask for. It will limit the reach of the biased news content put out by his properties and limit the public exposure. Also as a publisher of a small Online Community Newspaper, I hope that Gannett and the other big news publishing companies follow suit. It's win win for me.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
At least Fox News will still be free.
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.
I'm going to predict that this will work.
Who cares about how many hits you have, when the real key is profitability. The WSJ is pretty good online and its worth the subscription.
Obviously Fox News's site is a different animal but if you just had a Fox media site with reporting that was real, it could work.
But for that to happen, you have to give people content they are willing to pay for, and that means that Murdoch has to invest in journalism if he wants people to pay for it.
Technologically, what the media needs is a micro-payments system setup so that you can have a single billing identity that lets you get all the stories... it would cover Fox, CBS, etc, and a bunch of news sites.
This is my sig.
Because a sheep-like mentality is limited to the right wing only?
The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep or assume that they're not intelligent.
"In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide..." Is it possible to mod a story submission as flamebait?
The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep or assume that they're not intelligent.
No... here let me help you...
The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep and then put them all in ovens.
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?
Are you implying Rupert Murdoch cares what Jesus says? Rupert was probably one of the guys that got chased from the temple.
Murdoch bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Not such a hot property these days. I wouldn't put any money into Murdoch's internet instincts.
It seems that, despite (or rather, because of) Murdoch's strangehold on your media, most people really don't understand the megabadness of Murdoch.
I know, I know, soooo 20th Century... so I'll boil it down for you geeks: You know the Jedi Emperor? Murdoch doesn't just look like that guy - in the cast of malignities afflicting the planet, he *is* that guy.
Google for more. You'll be surprised what you didn't know about old Rupe.
you had me at #!
I can't wait until I'm old enough to feel ways about stuff.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
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!:
huzzah!
keep it up, angry, ineffectual low iq losers on the right
all the news is cheer nowadays
enjoy your march into the sunset
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
People that labels themselves and refuse to consider those they disagree are competent are lemmings.
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.
Online news has been stuck in a prisoner's dilemma situation (from their POV). If everyone charged for news, then they'd be OK. When only some people charge for news, those that charge lose their audience. That drives the system to the equilibrium of noone charging for news. From the consumer's POV this is a good thing.
Because Murdoch owns so much of the news, he might be able to break out of the current poor (for newspaper publishers) equilibrium. Of course, if he can do so then he's pretty much demonstrated that he has enough of a monopoly that market power isn't working. There would be evidence for an anti-trust case against him.
The other problem with all this is that it assumes that the problem newspapers are having with revenue is caused by the cannibalisation of the print editions by the online editions. I understand, although I cannot provide evidence, that the real problem is that the classified market has gone away. The newspapers lunch got eaten by eBay and Craigslist, not cannibalised by their own online offerings. And if this is true, then raising prices for consumers might increase revenue, but it wont return it to where it was.
Dan Rather: "Fake but accurate."
A pithy summary for a document that no one for a moment disputed was false based on its contents.
You're just another shill who has a bent, nothing more and nothing less. Take off the rose colored glasses, and stop pretending that only one part of the media manipulates.
The mainstream broadcast media has their problems, and certainly biases, but nobody else in broadcast media working on an out-and-out agenda at the scale that Fox works.
Tweet, tweet.
Maybe you can get that from a typical hosting company, who oversells their capacity and bet that nobody uses even a fraction of it and who has one administrator for a whole low rent data center... But real servers (dedicated servers, not virtuals crammed 100 to a box), full capacity pipes, and dedicated administrators with a triple nine data center cost considerably more.
On top of which, you conveniently forgot the cost of providing content - which isn't cheap.
Murdoch doesn't give a shit, it just happens that a lot of idiots buy into nationalistic sensationalism, so he sells them what they want. In the UK the sun isn't too bad compared to the mail and is more left wing than the telegraph, the (london) times and thelondonpaper arn't particularity bad either. Over here the colbert report goes out on fx, so the idea that murdoch and his nth wife sit down and tell fox news to spread right wing bullshit is pretty dumb, he just sells "news" to the lowest common denominator, he doesn't really care who's in power he's fucking loaded anyway!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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 a newspaper mogul not understand about ad supported content? Most of the cost of a newspaper is ads. You really think fifty cents a copy pays for content, printing and distribution?
Similarly how can he not understand about supply and demand? His competitors are not other newspapers who try to adopt the same business model. His competitors are the free, ad-supported news services. On a level playing field, they'll eat him alive.
I can't believe he's this stupid, so he must think he has an ace up his sleeve. And the only ace I can think of in this case is government intervention.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He isn't.
News Corp has deep pockets and a wealth of profit-making websites.
He understands it would be suicide for his readership of his newspapers if he charged for access, but rivals didn't.
It would be a slightly slower suicide if he charged nothing at all.
So perhaps his plan is this:
1. Charge for access to all his news sites.
2. Encourage rivals to charge also (it has been already flagged that newspapers are willing to work as a bloc on this issue).
3. Watch while readership plunges at all newspaper websites following the introduction of pay-per-view.
4. Hold out until his major rivals are all broke.
5. Maintain a cost for viewing online publications
6. Close down newspaper print editions as readers migrate to paying for content online
7. Scoop up profits and increase influence
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
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.
I have NEVER seen an accurate newspaper article on a subject I was conversant in. Not once. Which leads me to believe they're equally worthless on subjects I'm not conversant in as well.
Michael Crichton says something similar (though you have shown yourself to be an exception) in his speech Why Speculate ?.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
"That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
"But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."
Squirrel!