Slashdot Mirror
The Times Erects a Paywall, Plays Double Or Quits
DCFC writes "News International, owners of The Times and The Sunday Times announced today that from June readers will be required to pay £1 per day or £2 per week to access content. Rupert Murdoch is delivering on his threat to make readers pay, and is trying out this experiment with the most important titles in his portfolio. No one knows if this will work — there is no consensus on whether it is a good or bad thing for the industry, but be very clear that if it succeeds every one of his competitors will follow. Murdoch has the luxury of a deep and wide business, so he can push this harder than any company that has to rely upon one or two titles for revenue."
because if this eventual-epic-fail causes Rupert Murdoch to lose just some of his monopoly power over the media, the world will be better off for it.
Lets iterate this hypothesis a bit.
It's 350$ a year if you wish to pay avery day anew, but it's 104$ if you pay every week.
The next step I would implement, will be 50$ if you pay once per month, followed up with 35$ if you pay once per year.
So if you subscribe for a year you get a rebate of 90%. Suddenly this scheme does not look so bad at all.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
Back in the day, when Murdoch started in Australia, his commercial rival was Kerry Packer. Both of them lobbied hard to have media cross ownership laws broken down so they eventually ended up owning most of the Australian media outlets (newspapers and such like). Murdoch left Australia, where his base company Publishing and Broadcast Limited was formed after establishing a strong commercial base with Fox in the US. Murdoch is grooming his son to take over, and he seems even scarier than dad.
Meanwhile, back in Au, Packer died and his son took over who ended up selling off his Broadcast and Publishing businesses to get into Casinos.
The void left behind is utterly bland, and the media cross ownership laws left behind have just allowed companies interested in asset stripping to come in and, well, do what they do.
The only interesting media is Publicly owned, and I hope the BBC will reverse their decision to back away from internet media. It's that kind of thinking that is the future. It's probably time for these old commercial medias to die off anyway having seen what they look like when they die. The irony in all this was to watch the public broadcasters point out that some PBL papers were plagiarising peoples weblogs at the very time Murdoch was talking of paywalls. If they can't develop original content, people will see it's crap, Faux looses advertising revenue and Murdoch just put another nail in commercial media's coffin.
It will be interesting to watch this comedy play out.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's hinted in the article -- and I've seen it elsewhere -- that if they retain 5% of their current online readership, that counts as a win.
That's a small enough number that my instinct ("Nobody'll pay for it") doesn't feel all that reliable.
Is it just about possible that 5% will pay? I think it's unlikely, but not completely impossible. It'll be interesting to see, that's for sure.
The Guardian is indeed an excellent source of free news, but with pre-tax losses of nearly $134m last year, it's anyone's guess how long that will last.
The BBC isn't in the same boat, of course, since it's funded by British licence fee payers, but should the Conservatives win the next general election, its operation also looks set to be scaled back considerably.
Thankfully, the Guardian, which has far superior journalism and doesn't seek to ram politics down everyone's throats in "news" stories like News International's papers do (people often talk of the paper being liberal, which on its comments pages is largely true, but they do a good job of keeping it out of their news reporting)
That generally just means their political bent matches yours, so you don't notice it as much as in the papers you disagree with. In 1992, the Scott Trust (The Guardian's owner) explicitly declared "remaining faithful to liberal tradition" as part of its central objective for The Guardian. So it's not just "largely true"; it's part of the mission.
While US newspapers make a big palaver about their news reporting being politically neutral and objective, UK newspapers do not -- in the UK there is much greater recognition that the choice of what news to report is itself affected by the editor's political beliefs (what they consider important), so there can be no such thing as a politically neutral paper even if the articles are written in dry matter-of-fact language. Rather than trying to pretend to be above all that, the UK papers are instead fairly open about their editorial biases, and it's well known which ones lean towards which readerships -- for example the famous Yes Minister quote. Similarly, where I used to work we often found ourselves commenting in the tea room "The Independent is leading with a story on global warming. It must be Thursday." In short, the UK papers care about editorial independence but not neutrality.
The exception, of course, is the BBC, which has a legislative requirement to portray a "balanced" view on any political matter.
one thing I've never understood: if the newspapers wanted us to pay, would be they willing to provide advertising free news in exchange for paid access? I don't think so.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Have you tried to live without a TV in the UK? I did for 6 years. The TV Licensing people refused to believe that I didn't have one and kept pestering me to get a license. One year I had to sign two copies of the "I promise I don't have a TV set" form within a fortnight, speak to them on the phone and to deal with a TV License Inspector who turned up on my doorstep at 6pm one day.
The funny thing is, I became a great BBC Radio 4 fan during that time. It's paid for by the TV License fee, but you don't need such a license to listen to the radio...
It's a funny old world.
Stick Men
Donate to WikiLeaks? Quality investigative reporting (in the realm of government) is amost a myth. Some journalists have the balls to repeat the claims of an anonymous source while keeping the source anonymous, and in the pre-internet days that was important, but its rapidly becoming less so.
I do see quality investigative reporting in the realm of consumer advocacy, but in politics the press has devolved to repeating any claim that damages the party they don't like, without even spending 5 minutes of Google to see if it passes the laugh test.
The National Inquirer is up for a Pulitzer this year, believe it or not, for running a tawdry sex scandal story about a politician. If that's not a sign of how far political journlism has fallen, I don't know what is.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.