Slashdot Mirror
UK Newspaper Websites To Become Nearly Invisible
smooth wombat writes "Various websites have tried to make readers pay for access to select parts of their sites. Now, in a bid to counter what he claims is theft of his material, Rupert Murdoch's Times and Sunday Times sites will become essentially invisible to web users. Except for their home pages, no stories will show up on Google. Starting in late June, Google and other search engines will be prevented from indexing and linking to stories. Registered users will still get free access until the cut off date."
People getting news will find other sources, and the advertising revenue will go to whomever to the competition.
And nothing of value was lost.
I would think that most people would appreciate getting less "news" from Rupert Murdock and his Right Wing tabloids. Though the Idle section on Slashdot may never be the same.
It's as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...but no one cared.
If Times and Sunday Times are going to be come invisible on the internet. They should prepare them self for closing down there web pages as a next logical step.
If nobody can find you on the internet, nobody is going to read you too. There drop in traffic is going to measure up, and make someone else popular instead.
Will this actually happen or is it just a threat? Murdoch isn't that stupid.
reporters had the purpose of gathering information from witnesses to various events, and redistributing that information. ...
today, some bloggers can read a few other blogs from witnesses, and redistribute that information.
yes, it will take some time to get this new system to work properly, but advertisers will give money to bloggers instead of reporters, so
i don't know. maybe some bloggers will be good enough so that readers will prefer to pay them directly instead of seeing adverts on the blog, but i really don't see where a big media mogul fits into all this.
new sig
I am willing to bet that eventually they'll start loosing more money than they are now. They are probably making a decent amount of money on advertising right now, and they will probably end up making less on paid subscriptions than they currently do on advertising. Will they eventually reverse course in 6months to a year?
I guess we'll see... but for the majority of the internet, this means the death of murdoch's online news dominance. Good Riddance.
google.slashdot
People will be less likely to come across Murdoch tripe on the web. This is a Good Thing, as it should reduce the number of victims of his misinformation.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
This is like a store in a busy shopping area boarding up its windows and saying, "You must come inside to see what we have to offer!"
Good to see that howlin' mad Murdoch is taking the advice that I and so many other Slashdotters have offered him. He could have done this at any time if he'd really wanted his pages out of the indexes.
Gone by June, Back by July.
Personally I think the guy is the worst thing that has come out of capitalism. He's also poison for any democracy.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I expect it from the Sun, but the Times and Sky News should at least pretend to be unbiased.
James Murdoch makes a scene at the offices of the Independent: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/22/james-murdoch-independent-dodge-city
Adam Boulton, Sky anchor, frankly loses the plot during an interview. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/may/10/adam-boulton-alastair-campbell
Kay Burley, another Sky anchor, well I'm actually speechless: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/may/08/kay-burley-sky-news-twitter
Between 'em, they managed to generate over 1500 complaints to the broadcasting regulator: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/12/sky-news-adam-boulton
Rupert can go boil his head.
This is weapons grade idiocy in action. Murdoch chose to make the material freely available, inviting anyone with a web browser to come and read it. Google merely advertised its existence, to his benefit and ours, hooking up browsers with the content. And simple because Google could find a way to make money from the value they added (to both producer and consumer!) what they are doing is "theft"?
The Murdochs of this word are dinosaurs, moaning in hunger-maddened anger as the forests give way to grassland that they're not equipped to browse on. If dinosaurs had had lawyers, they've had sued the grass for displacing the cycads.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Not that I don't agree with the article, but it is worth pointing out for full disclosure that the New York Post is owned by News Corporation as is The Times and The Sunday Times.
It'll make it interesting when Slashdot has to start putting up stories from niche websites instead of mainstream if they all go behind paywalls.
Considering the newspapers News International publishes, I don't really consider this a loss. The less of "The Sun" and "News Of The World" seen on-line the better, really; only the "The Times" and "Sunday Times" could really be considered any kind of a loss.
Now if only we could get "The Daily Mail" to follow suit.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
_Some_ people get the whole thing about distribution costs plummeting and the need for new business models. Example: The Guardian.
Others don't. Example: Rupert Murdoch.
For people interested in these matters, I suggest techdirt.com -- I am not affiliated, but I love reading their stuff.
I've already removed the Times as a news RSS feed, switching to the Guardian instead. Until all of the quality feeds follow Murdoch down this particular rabbit hole, he is going to lose out. How long does he have before he sees that he is charging off by himself "Yup, go for it Rupie, we're right behind you" (tee hee)
I would feel slightly more sympathy if I wasn't already paying a Sky subscription, so I feel that I already have a licence for the IP.
I wonder if this is a gambit to get laws passed limiting the availability of articles, where the Times and other sites lose money, then end up whining to the governments of US and Europe that "news piracy" or some other tripe like that is affecting them and causing them dire losses. Of course, with a sympathetic ear, I wonder if some provision to ACTA might be added to persecute news aggregation sites, or make them liable similar to how MGM vs. Grokster set the basis of making Grokster liable for inducing infringement.
Ever since Google News debuted, I've been trying to figure out a way to block Murdoch's evil media empire content from being shown, just so that I don't accidentally click on any of his links. I'm very glad to see that he's going to do it for me.
I'm very curious to see whether people will notice the change in news bias if most of the major MSM sites go behind paywalls.
For decades the MSM, which functions essentially as the marketing department of the business/government/media oligarchy, has been western society's way of defining reality.
How might people's view of the world, and their own worlds, change as paywalls muffle that particular voice and allow others to be heard?
If this does lead to of any kind social change, it will be quite beautiful that it was their own unstoppable quest for more money that led the plutocracy over the cliff.
and don't let the door hit your arse on the way out.
This is newsworthy?
Thats what it is for!
It has always been up to the site owner to choose which parts are to be indexed. Shouldn't be any more news than a rewrite of the site's css-file.
But here Murdoch gets rewarded with news coverage not because he changes the indexing rules, but because he finally stops playing stupid and recognizes that it is up to his company to set those rules in the first place!
bickerdyke
All Rupert Murdoch news is heavily biased and full of propaganda anyhow. Maybe now the general public will get a chance to read unbiased, uncontrolled news and wake up.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Wow, Matt Drudge will lose 90% ( not counting bretbart ) of his links.
Lots of web sites have got robots.txt files, how come Murdoch's merits a front-page slashdot story?
They sell paper with information on it, and advertisements in them.
Digital information is too uncontrolled and cant be metered like electricity and so its not for them.
So, i can see their point of view. Still I doubt that the world articles don't all come from them.
their "centre of the world" viewpoint will probably be their downfall ultimately.
Time will tell, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Everyone I know who actually reads a paper is over 40 and does it the old fashioned way - sitting back with a cup of tea with it spread over the table. Anyone else either gets the news from TV, or reads the BBC website (it doesn't have to be the BBC, but the point is it is free and people find their reasons to trust it). Anyone else still either doesn't give two shits what is happening elsewhere or reads the sun, mainly to look at the tits on their lunch break. The third group of people isn't even inherently political, and could do well without their opinion being subtly subverted by the offal that gets printed in that trash, but unfortunately they've found a good place to leech the thoughts of the general public and no one knows how to get rid of them...but they're nothing but rich fucks trying to talk down to the everyday persons level. Only a bunch of narcissistic cunts could imagine that people really want to hear about what brand of nose hair removal wax the Beckhams are using this week (yes I'm sure theres something more topical than those two attention whores, but I wouldn't care to know about it). 90% of their audience probably have more personal integrity than Murdoch could ever dream about.
So since I don't value Murdoch's opinion that highly, I don't think I am very phased about this news at all :)
Why would a million voices cry out if nobody cared? Come on, at least use the recycled memes appropriately...
Beeing lost to the Info-sea of the Internet, we will keep you in good memory!
If only Fox and CNN can be persuaded to follow suit with their websites, and maybe move their televised channels to a subscription model as well.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
The Big News guys are clearly getting desperate. Essentially I think this is a move to boutique magazine status, or peer journal as someone else said above, for the Times'. I think it is great, that news and The News are now parting company, we can get info of quality at slashdot and others, and there is less (?) digging through piles of propaganda, ads and lowbrow white noise that essentially were required to pay for newspaper's monopoly, running a huge printmachine, using newspaper, and distributing newspaper.The big picture is heading towards efficiency. Our brains win.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
I was always under the impression that the ads are what pays for the newspapers, not the minimal fee we purchase them for.
Considering that, it would be ridiciolous to charge for online articles, rather than have them be ad-supported. The costs of running a website are insignificant compared to distributing tons of paper around the world.
We are all God's parents.
Theft of "his" material???? What an assclown! "His" material is news about people and world events. "He" didn't create it in the first place, just reported it.
You can read it on the train, you can read it on the lavatory - and if you run out of toilet paper ..... there's something else you can't do with a laptop. You can even line your parrot's cage with it.
What Murdoch is about to find out is that the value people place on the content is quite small, especially when most of it is celebrity gossip, ill-informed and bigoted columnists and rants disguised as stories - written purely to promote the owner's politics. The real value of the newspaper is it's ease of use. Once you take that away the disadvantages of a web-only publication far outweigh the lower price. He will also find out that just because news costs money to gather, script and present doesn't mean that people are willing to pay that cost and that presentation is a much bigger part of the deal.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Murdoch has exited the Forbes top 100. Except nobody noticed, because only his pay sites mentioned it at all.
UK Newspaper Web Sites To Become Nearly Invisible
Given that we are talking about one Rupert Murdoch web site, this title is bad even for slashdot. The Times of London used to be an important paper, comparable to the New York Times. Then Rupert Murdoch bought it, and it rapidly ceased to be significant. (As far as I can tell, any news organization taken over by Murdoch rapidly ceases to become a significant news organization.) To say that this is all of the British press going silent is simply ridiculous. Try reading the Independent or the Guardian if you want a taste of the British news that is not going silent.
To use an archaic analogy, this is like removing your publications from the library catalogue. I know what would happen in that situation: the book will be left on the shelf unless someone accidentally finds it while looking for something else. He better hope that others besides google link to his stuff.
We have far too many news papers, reporting on exactly the same story, the only difference is how the paper spins the story (pro-labour, pro-tory, anti-eu, etc). All this ends-up with news stories that are very shallow on facts. I'll read the UK news while its free, as the content is mostly useless. The only time i'll pay for news is when the stories actually have some depth, are well researched, informative and are spin free.
bid farewell to our old news overlords.
Murdoch just does not understand that his business model is fundamentally broken.
The world has moved on and we have access to almost real time news from many sources. This means that publications such as those his businesses produce need to look for new value to offer in order to attract customers and income. His position that the value of information has not changed and that he should continue to make money from it as he used to when publication was a restricted activity is simply not feasible.
Let him go ahead and remove his business presence from the 'net. It just means his opinion will have less impact as more people move from paper to online news and "news added value" sources.
The biggest problem is that you cannot use a web site to wrap your fish 'n chips.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Murdoch is a dinosaur. Now, if we can just get his printed stuff off the racks as well, the world would be a better place. Seriously - if all the scumbag red-tops follow suit, the world would improve.
Conservatives hate MSNBC for being run by GE and having green weeks and sprending the "progressive" agenda.
Liberals hate FOX news for spreading "misinformation" and pushing conservative values on everyone.
Too much time is spent attacking each other and not enough time debating the issues in a responsible manner. Attacking the left or attacking the right only perpetuates the problem.
I by no means support everything I hear from the "right wing" media, but I'm tired of being dismissed as "misinformed" when I disagree with the "main stream". Let's have a debate.
Rupert Murdoch has an audience. You may not agree with those views. I think slashdotters have more interesting things to say than Rupert Murdoch is a douche.
oh yea and he really knows what is what
the dick head stands by arcane copyright laws and at the same time murdoch himself steals photographers images & refuses to pay the guy
(as in the photographer who took the great shots of the volcano in iceland)
http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/scitech/2010/03/21/volcano-erupts-iceland/?slide=29#slide=1
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/39219
http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/story/photographer-claims-fox-news-stole-his-volcano-pics_1141322
he is a liar and a arsehole and needs to be removed from his monopolizing business
I'm less sceptical than the vast majority of posters here about this. First of all there is nothing evil about them choosing not to give their product away for free. Many of the posters here seem to think that because they want paying for their work that they are evil in some way! And I imagine they've thought this through... Sure, if they simply stick up the same news that's available anywhere else and try to charge for it then this will certainly fail. But hopefully they have enough sense not to do that. Imagine instead though that at the bottom of each major article in the print newspaper they have a code, something like "See code 123XYZ" online for more information on this subject. That if you for example read an article about the situation in korea, that it links to a page with the history and analysis of the situation there by proper writers. And to links to all the previous articles, not just automated keyword links but a proper index written by an actual journalist. It could be pushed quite heavily in the print newspaper, and could have deals where paper subscribers get online subscriptions free for 3 months then reduced price. The point is to integrate the two parts so that the print part is lighter and easier to read but "hyperlinks" to a much deeper version online, and the expectation would be that you would subscribe to *both* generally. The problem with "free" news sites is they are very superficial. Because that matches their readership. They just want to know the news and move on. Pages of analysis of the news and the history written up properly will only appeal to a tiny minority of their readers, but on a subscription site it's likely that people have subscribed exactly for more in depth coverage than they could find in a printed paper, or on a random free news site. People on slashdot complain about news coverage being superficial but this could bring together enough people who are willing pay a little for deeper coverage. If that's profitable then it will happen... I certainly think this could work for them. At present the online part probably makes little money from advertising, has significant production costs, and steals people who would other wise have paid for a print version. If they do this right they they will spend a bit more money on it, but have a much better combined offering where the print and online versions don't compete with each other in the same way. But they'll probably just put the paper version online with a few extra bits, and hope people send them money...
Please do this in Australia too.
Getting the Daily Telegraph, Australian, Herald-Sun, Sunday Times, Adelaide Advertiser etc off the internet would be good (there are better places to find the news that matters anyway such as the ABC)
We hardly knew ye.
He's shot himself in the foot here. But at least none of us will have to read his tripe, instead we can spend more time reading much better stuff like dubli!
Let's hope so!
No sig today...
Is it just me or am I the only person who *won't* pay for news because it inherently means that someone is being paid to write something that someone else wants them to? "Independent" or not, I don't think I've ever paid for news services, ever, at all - the closest I got was, for a while, paying for a TV licence. I don't buy papers, I don't watch the news, I don't subscribe to any news websites. Never have done.
However, if I catch wind of an interesting bit of news (which therefore removes any political, celebrity or hyperbole news), I look it up on the Internet and have done ever since I had a connection to it. About the only "news" that I consume readily is the free paper given out on the London Underground (The Metro - you can read it online at www.metro.co.uk as a PDF each morning but I don't know if they restrict non-UK access) and BBC News. The former because it's free, simplified and I don't detect too much bias in it (despite being owned by a biased-company, but again, political news rarely interests me), the latter because, well, the same reasons.
Paying for news is very old-fashioned, older than my generation really, and likely to only give you the one-sided impression that you want. I want my news to be free, refreshing, fact-based (and therefore sometimes contrary to my opinions), otherwise what's the point in reading it? News is, basically, a form of up-to-date entertainment to me. After decades of free papers, "free" Teletext news (if you owned a working TV), "free" news programmes, free Internet news, free news texted to my phone, etc.etc.etc. who still would ever want to pay for it? You could argue that paying for it gets you "higher-quality" news (whatever that means) but I discover things that are relevant to me, that are reported fairly, and go into enough detail to get me interested in personally researching the actual truth all the time. I don't have time to follow up a lot of the things I would like to. Even the news can't keep up and often have to recycle old Science news that we've all known about for months. And you'd be extraordinarily hard-pressed to make "better quality" news than the BBC or Metro, no matter what you paid for it. Every outlet gets the same news within the same minute, everyone buys the same photos from the same photographers, everyone gets the same quotes from the relevant people. News isn't "new"s any more.
What I'd give my right-arm for would be a Metro that had a much larger Science section, that wasn't quite so dumbed down. Or a really decent IT section. Even in my areas of interest, 99% of the science / IT / maths stories are just ridiculously obvious, well-known or under-stated. But I'd only like that because it would still be distributed as free PDF's that are emailed to my inbox every morning. If you asked me to pay much more than a token donation, you'd be losing my readership. I pay for the services I choose to consume but with paid-news, I would just choose not to consume. It's really not that important to me, or makes that much difference. Ten minutes research on any subject / incident that I am interested in gets me infinitely more detailed facts than a paper could ever convey, and without the hang-back of reporting restrictions.
In the end, the "death" of news is nothing new itself. I'm 31 and I've never bought a newspaper for myself, never bought a news website subscription, or paid to view an article, or anything else. I've always wondered how *any* newspaper made money in the last 20 years, if it wasn't by advertising and a low cover-price. Metro has held on for over 10 years with the same business model, so it's obviously doing something right. Interestingly, Murdoch's copy-cat paper "thelondonpaper" (Yes, apparently they don't know about spaces and capital letters) went under trying to survive with the same model.
News isn't worth paying for - it's a five-minute distraction on the way into work and/or two minutes research saved for anyone that actually WANTS to know the facts about anything. As it
Same as the media industry in general. Radio and TV used to be funded primarily by advertising.
Those were relatively low revenue businesses, after all no one cared to pay too much for a newspaper they throw away at the end of the day, and no one cared to pay to listen to the radio or watch TV. It's different from buying a car or clothes or any other durable item that you would use for years.
Then pure unadulterated greed came in. Now they want to charge us for every image we see, for every sound we hear. They want to put meters in our eyes and ears. I say fuck them.
Let them go broke if advertising doesn't pay enough. Let other investors come in, investors who are smart enough to know they cannot charge more than people are ready to pay.
Murdoch already runs his newspapers as a boutique business and gets his money from elsewhere. Think of all his other media outlets, listen to the message he's spreading about all of us on the net being pirates and thieves and look at how governments are reacting (eg. drastic cuts to BBC news and BBC web presence). His hysterical screaming travelling roadshow on this issue for the past three years has not been for our benefit, it has been for the benefit of gullible or easily influenced governments and regulatory bodies around the world.
He's not an out of touch dinosaur, he owned an internet service provider in 1993 FFS and he's based his entire career on being surrounded by experts that can find an advantage for him in any deal. He understands the net more than many readers here - the problem is he doesn't care if he ruins it for everyone else if he can make a buck out of it.
I'll really miss the jingoistic right wing ultra-nationalist/nazi rants from 'The Sun', combined with the soft porn, and the usual collections of vacuous 'celebrity' inspired tat.
Or, how about the sombre, dreary ring wing rant drone of 'The Times', as it peddles Mr Murdoch's profit centered, neo-liberal ideology of greed, and powerful corporate interests.
Thank you for being so greedy, Mr Murdoch - and good riddance.
Murdoch? The same guy who bought one of the best newspapers in the world and turned it into a gossip-rag? He's going to employ proper writers to write for his audience? LOL!
No sig today...
when the paywall sites go t*ts up? ah well I guess he can consign himself to the fact that he will gain a certain level of long fame as we stop saying "buggy whip manufacturers" as a generic term for obsolete industries and start using "Murdoch's News Empire" .
if Google News was finally disinfected from the Fox News comtamination. I dumped it long ago as it become obvious that Google was either complicit or clueless about Fox News gaming the system to have their propagandistic headlines appear on any story even tangentially connected to US politics. For all pratcial purposes, Google News is now equivalent to The Drudge Report and is of no interest to me.
Most of the "reporting" I've seen lately is little more than bias and opinion wrapped in malice without regard or even search for facts. I use newspaper articles to demonstrate bad editing and bad journalism to students.
Bloggers at least have the excuse that they are individuals without any significant resources. There is no excuse for newspapers presenting fiction as fact, not citing sources, not using qualifiers, and deliberately using headlines which misrepresent the content. Congratulations. I've been waiting quite some time for newspapers to die the death they so richly deserve. Maybe something worthwhile will rise from the ashes.
I will be happy to continue reading the Telegraph website (especially for the Alex and Matt cartoons), The Guardian website and the BBC News website. I also check news.google.co.uk every day. I doubt I'll be left out of the loop at all. Occasionally I even click on links to stories on the Daily Mail or The Sun websites, newspapers that I probably would never consider buying (for differing reasons).
Thing is, I do buy physical issues of The Times at the weekend, once or twice a month, mostly on Sunday but sometimes on Saturdays as well. It just depends how busy I am and what my routine for the day will end up being.
well its not what it once was... the self marginalisation will hopefully kill this rag off
Craigslist is invisible to Google and they are doing quite well. The value of Google is a business partner is way overrated.
The Times has previewed its new paywall system, to keep readers, search engines and other criminals from using it to download cars, to the sound of champagne corks popping at the Guardian, Telegraph and BBC.
The newspaper will now require payment of £1 a day for its unique and high-quality editorial viewpoints, as taken from the Sun and rewritten in big words. The site also blocks anyone under 18 from registering, in order to keep the paper's quality demographic aging nicely.
"I firmly support this move," said everyday citizen on the street and certainly not Guardian editor at all Alan Rusbridger. "In fact, it should be ten pounds a day. Ten pounds a story. Then people will really see it as high-quality merchandise and not rewritten press releases and news feeds with Mr Murdoch dictating the editorial page."
"It's ours," said James Murdoch, frothing slightly. "You thieving bastards steal our copyright every time you save a copy into your heads! Well, we'll fix your little wagon. It's a pound a day plus a pound a copy behind your eyes plus a pound a copy you talk about with anyone else plus a pound a copy just fucking because. It's for me and Dad and you can just fuck off. And when we buy the BBC we won't let you watch that either. Arseholes."
"OK, the champagne is Thunderbird Sparkling," said Mr Rusbridger. "Times are tough, you know. But I have complete faith we're on the right path and the Times is doomed. I told ’em, I told ’em. Spare fiddy pee for a Polly Toynbee column? God bless you, sir!"
"I am one hundred percent behind paying for quality journalism," said free culture activist Hiram Nerdboy, 17. "That's why I just gave fifty quid to Wikileaks."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
No more manipulating the public with bogus news using the "news"-papers as advertising agents, no more advertising for interest groups, in fact Rupert Murdoch is on a winner...a winner only where everyone else is concerned
When their subscription rate is only 500 people they will cry about how mean old Google won't index the sites they told Google not to index.
fixed for you.
n/t
This appears to be an experiment by Murdoch *AND* Google, so you can bet a *LOT* of business folks are watching this move.
Just over a week ago, this showed up on The Financial Times website:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a411a2de-62b7-11df-b1d1-00144feab49a.html
===
Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, said the internet company had had talks with Rupert Murdoch and other newspaper proprietors about helping run subscription services for their online sites.
The talks may indicate a thawing of hostilities between Google and newspapers – particularly Mr Murdoch’s News Corp titles.
Mr Murdoch has repeatedly criticised Google for undermining newspapers by allowing internet users too much access to their valuable news content. Last November, he threatened to sue Google for including headlines from News International, which publishes of his UK titles, in its search results.
The Times and Sunday Times UK titles are next month set to introduce a paywall limiting access to their online news sites to paying customers. The papers will also withdraw their articles from Google’s search engine.
However, it seems that Google could still have a role with news sites – perhaps getting them to use the Google Checkout service to help subscribers pay for content.
Mr Schmidt said he had a good relationship with Mr Murdoch, “outside of public posturing.”
“We have talked to Rupert and quite a few others. I think we currently have peace. We have talked to News Corp and other companies for a months on these sorts of things,” Mr Schmidt told journalists on Tuesday at Google’s Zeitgeist conference outside London.
“I would rather not talk about specific news on any deal. But we are a platform, not a competitor to newspapers. Today we have an advertising answer for them, but we would like to have other answers for them as well.”
Mr Schmidt said he believed online news sites would have a combination of revenue models, including advertising, subscriptions and micropayments.
Google’s proposals for using Checkout have met with a wary response from media groups, however, with some arguing that it had more to gain than the newspapers from such an arrangement.
Ebay’s PayPal, Checkout’s much larger rival, has also been angling for a role in subscription payments.
Mr Schmidt was keen to stress that Google was not interested in competing with newspapers for content.
“Google will not get into the content business, but we can build tools for it,” he said.
==
You think rich people can't make mistakes? Conrad Black was a super rich newspaper baron once too, now he sits in a federal prison. If life is fair, Rupert can be his bunk-mate.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Is there any research showing that this works (i.e. that cutting people off from the online version of the paper either drives them to pay for access or buy the print version)?
TFA makes it sound like a whim; hard to believe that such a large corp would make a move like w/o some research to support it.
So we will need to pay to see who we have to vote for? Good riddance to bad journalism.
In space no-one can hear your vuvuzela.
He is old.
That means he will be dead some day soon.
And when he goes, I intend to drink a few pints in his
honor and then piss on his grave.
So.. Pure News Journalism is dying out. What do we have then?
Bloggers and Company/Government Statements?
Hmph, I disagree with a lot of people that say good riddance to the lies from newspaper. Where do YOU think the source of information will come from if people don't get paid anymore to do investigative journalism.
From The Times to the Sunday Times, a paywall has descended on the British Isles.
5) They make themselves available as paid articles for the iPad, make them glossy enough, and actually make some money, whilst at the same time allowing Google limited access to to their headlines to act as a teaser to draw people in
Yeah, but that would mean drinking both Murdoch's and Jobs' cool-aid and becoming an iSlave, and no one is stupid enough to do that...oh wait, we're talking about Murdoch's minions here. Nevermind.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
This is not just going to affect The Times and The Sunday Times, but his other papers like "The Sun". The Sun rag is mostly know for page3 (a page that has a picture a day of a topless / semi-nude women on.... page 3). With so much free kink on the internet, does he think people will be willing to pay for his kink?
Although there is a separate challenge to anyone that can spot "news" in The Sun.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I'm a developer for The Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/ ) - a UK newspaper not owned by Murdoch, which doesn't have any intention of becoming invisible any time soon - rather than erecting a paywall, we've spent the last year putting together a content API that allows anyone to explore our content using search terms, faceting, etc - and then build your own application upon it. Check it out here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform/getting-started
The implementation, written in Scala and based on Apache Solr/Lucene stack was pretty good fun (we plan to opensource it within a few months) - slides with some of the implementation details are here :
http://www.slideshare.net/openplatform/the-guardian-open-platform-content-api-implementation
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, recently gave a pretty deep lecture on the 'open vs closed' & 'authority vs involvement' questions raised by the spectre of paywalls:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/cudlipp-lecture-alan-rusbridger
cheers,
Roberto
(views my own, not necessarily those of my employer, yack yack yack)
The scary thing is though is that when, or if, it does fail and he starts losing money, Murdock will start blaming the BBC again and claim it's their fault for his loss of traffic. Using this "evidence" he will demand some more of the licence fee, thus reduceing the BBC's budget further. This is something that I would hate to see.
"Murdoch"
Maybe when nobody gets any hits when they search for this twerp's name and he becomes invisible to the Web -- along with the rest of his enterprises -- he'll rethink his little hissy fit. The guy's deliberately shutting out the free advertising that the Web provides. If all I'm going to see is his newspapers' home pages and no content, what is going to entice me to pay for a subscription? Rupert's good name? Do his papers ever break any major stories and provide exclusive coverage? I surely can't recall ever hearing of one. Heck, even if they do, I guess I won't know about that now what with Rupert walling off his content from the people who might be willing to subscribe to it. The rest of the online newspapers will easily pick up the slack.
Murdoch is such a dolt. Who's he going to blame his next loss in revenues on?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Information wants to be free.
Most of what the "rags" offer nowadays is Biased propaganda.
This is also true of their web counteparts...who needs'em....
The second news sources becomes pay to view other sources will replace them.
End of Line.
Paywall the WSJ, NYPost, Fox News, and all the rest of your news fabrication factories while you're at it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
I guess Merdouche translated from French to English means "enema"?
Twinstiq, game news
Now say that Murdoch succeeds, and every major for-profit newspaper his pay-wall revolution: There would still be "news" sources that would grant free online access because their goal isn't to make money but to spread their particular view of the world. I can only imagine how the "news" agencies of certain totalitarian, authoritarian, and theocratic states would then come to dominate the flow of online information. The West will be shooting itself in the foot.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
- Aristotle
Of course, since we now know that most of nature (space) is a vacuum, perhaps it's enough to update this to say that Gravity abhors a vacuum. (or gravity wells do at any rate.)
I think we are all going along under the assumption that we will have a choice and individuals are the target customers. I think this will materialize more like the ESPN 360 web content where your ISP subscribes for you. Since you don't really have a choice of ISP you will, by default, be paying for your Murdoch news.
I can see this having a market. Personally I think the quality of most newssites has declined quite a bit the last years just to get those clicks, even lying sometimes, and some people still want quality articles. Now when newspapers are competing about who can post the "there is a vulcano on Iceland" news first the Times might just be worse of than the others. Assuming they pay their journalists more than the other newspapers do, which wouldn't be that suprising since they are trying to keep that good name that they have. So, if the Times have their high paid journalists doing just what the others are doing they might have to change something. I say let them try as I don't like the "every company should be doing what the most sucessful company in that buisness is doing" thing because I like diversity.
Prevented? How exactly? Robots.txt? Preventing linking to stories? How does a website stop me from linking to material? Sure, the link might not lead to the news without a login form, but hey..
If you want to help, write for wikinews. :)
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I pay 3 cents a month for the web version of my newspaper. I get real value for pocket change. I wouldn't pay 1 cent a month for a Murdoch publication because they don't deliver unbiased news. I don't mind bias in the editorial pages, just keep it out of the news. The Wall Street Journal used to have a good wall between news and editorial, but now it is a Murdoch rag.
photosMy Photostream
On the internet being invisible is like having no road access. It's alright for a vacation cabin on the lake but it sucks for a business. Oh well, they were going broke anyway. This will just speed things up a bit.
Murdoch files for Chapter 11 after last of his newspaper die because of the lack of the openness to the general public. He was found in the alley next to the remnants of his former media empire and was overheard muttering: "But I really thought newspapers don't need readers"
Oh wait, no, he wasn't.
Success in one field does not guarantee success in another. Murdoch does not seem to get the net,....
Gee I'll miss these sources.......not.......they'll simply be replaced by another source that I will view only because it showed up in Google. I would never have specifically gone to any of Rupy's papers only thru a Google link. That in turn might have led me to read other articles generating more ad revenue. Now they'll simply get zero from people like me of which I'm sure there are at least hundreds of thousands. What a boob.
This is the very best decision NewsCorp could make. Right in lockstep with the organization's obvious goal: to grind actual news reporting out of existence. Here's to the fervent hope that Mr. Murdoch extends this kind of elitist exclusivity to his FOX Television News division. It would glaringly illuminate his primary view of his audience, allowing that audience a lingering whiff of exactly what they really mean to him. Good on you, Robert!
Rupert has voluntarily removed himself & his 'papers' from the search pool for news aggregators? Wow, that's the first thing he's ever done that I didn't think was a complete dick move.
Thanks Rupert!
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
because they have so much money they can't lose.
If there's one thing my years in consulting has taught me, it's that the best way to convince someone they don't really want what they are asking for, is to give it to them.
The newspaper business has never been about selling access to the information as much as it has been about selling the eyeballs to advertisers.
He'll be back with a new business plan in about 6 months.
Murdoch, you're a dinosaur.
I would love to have an honest face to face conversation with him on why he thinks linking to a story on his sight that drives people to his site is bad for his business.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So
Blogger pays subscription
Copy/pastes everything to his own blog
Get traffic from Google
Profit from ads
Line the bottom of your bird cage?
Most of Murdoch's "news" is gossipy fluff and propaganda, so here's hoping this move sends the rest of his empire down the irrelevant hole that Myspace fell down.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
They already ARE invisible! ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Actually, that's probably pretty close. The retail price for a Kindle is $259 right now. A weekender edition of the NYT delivered to a local borough is not quite $200 a year. Make it a full 7 day delivery and it's over $300 to that same borough. 7 day delivery to a Midwestern city is about $370. It seems to me you could buy an awful lot of Kindles when those kind of numbers are being thrown around, especially when you consider that a bulk purchase is liable to get the NYT a big price break. Throw in some consideration with Amazon for exclusive content, and it becomes a very tempting deal for both parties. :)
Kudos to you and your employer. May you succeed beyond your wildest expectations!
We are actively blocking Google from access... blah blah... what that actually means is that they aren't putting a robots.txt file onto those pages. You always have to ask Google to index your site. Google is the windmill at which Old Rupie has successfully tilted. Good Job! You sure are showing them! Yep! Slashdotters will take note how I never called old Rupie a dumbass or anything.... Nope!
"The papers are betting that loyal readers will covet access to scarce content."
Sounds like Scientology's business model.
And there was much rejoicing.
... what IS The Drudge Report? Mostly just a news aggregator. Yes, it has broken several unique stories over it's lifetime, but it's MOSTLY just an aggregator.
The same could be said of most news outlets: TV and radio newsrooms, local newspapers, even the big chains (like Newscorp).
If not part of a chain, a local news operation primarily feeds stories from elsewhere and does a little reporting of its own - which OTHER news organizations "aggregate". It would typically subscribe to one or more news agencies - either co-ops (like AP) or news selling operations. Like the internet or open source software, participants in such organizations receive far more than they contribute.
Larger news operations, with multiple outlets, may do a higher percentage of their own reporting. But they still end up either "aggregating" or following up others' "scoops" - and competing on being "firstest with the mostest" and/or on their editing, focus, analysis, or viewpoint/bias.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Much like their revenue will become. Their demise will prove as an example of how not to adapt to the new digital world.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Huh, what do you mean only 1 person visited the site. I visited it this morning.
Oh, I was the one visitor?
Cameron is no fool; he may be a PR man but he has a first class degree from Oxford. So does one of my kids, so I know how hard that is to do. And what he saw was that Murdoch tried to swing the UK election and failed. In the UK, Murdoch has shot his bolt. Politicians know he cannot deliver. And Cameron depends on Clegg, and the Lib Dems have constantly been rubbished by Murdoch. It takes a worried man to sing a worried song, and that man is Keith Rupert Murdoch. Because he has been seen to have no clothes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
My quailty of life will not suffer one bit if I never hear the name Murdoch again. In fact maybe the opposite. The best journalism I see these days comes from democracynow.org, and english.aljazera.net. I had hopes for wikileaks.org but nothing much has been coming from there lately.
Life is Grand!
That will be the day, or is he hiding the sites behind his ego?
1.) A while back I needed some extra cash, so I took several paper routes. The newspaper is the main one for the area I live in, they charge 75 retail. However, it turns out that NONE of this money goes back to the publisher. The money collected from home delivery, machine sales & retail store sales is divided up this way: The Route manager gets a 1/3, the truck driver gets a 1/3 & the point of distribution(paper boy, store, machine filler) gets a 1/3. The publisher takes nothing, they get all their money from the ads.
2.) Some time ago I co-owned a small retail store. We sold a few magazines. We paid for the first month of all the mags we wanted to sell, then nothing more for as long as we were in business. I was a bit confused by this, so asked many questions of the distributor. He said: most mags work this way. The publisher makes their money from the ads & gives them to the distributor, often paying the distributor a small amount per mag "placed." Some stores actually get paid for placement of certain mags, in addition to keeping all the cover price. Subscriptions work the same way, which is why publisher's clearing house can have such a huge sweepstakes prize.
And they don't have any idea of how many people looked at the ad on page 147, more less even went to the manufacturer's website or looked for the product at the grocery store. My understanding is that web ads, while gleaning much more customer info, are far cheaper. It doesn't make sense to me...
http://newsarse.com/2009/08/07/rupert-murdoch-to-charge-idiots-to-read-rubbish/
Vetted News (TM)
And you, sir, lose.
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
Apparently Murdoch is afraid that everybody will get their news from google, instead of going to the news site. But, news.google.com only provides a quick over-view, to read the full article, you have to go to the site.
Isn't it helpful to Murdoch to let google get people interested in the story, so that the people may then go to the full article? The alternative is: people will not know anything about the story, and ignore the Murdoch site altogether.
Hopefully, people will Murdoch's news sites, just because Murdoch is such an ass.
Suddenly those papers' websites aren't going to get much traffic, advertisers are either going to leave or demand cheaper rates. This is a bonus to other news sites that still have free content, with more traffic they could potentially earn more money from advertisers.
For a guy who is obviously smart, he sure has no idea to cope with the Internet. I suppose you can't teach an old dog new tricks. He's living proof.
...This is how you lose readers.
I am not devoid of humor.
His blue pills must have a very strange side effect.
Seems like he went though a lot of trouble. Why didn't he just use a robots.txt file, as Google invited him to do on several occasions?
A classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. He doesn't like the idea of people "stealing" his content, so his solution is... to keep people from finding it, because they can't "steal" what they can't find. How clever, Rupert! Hey, dumbass: ANYTHING THE GETS EYEBALLS ON YOUR PAGE IS GOOD.
I think Google will be laughing their asses off as traffic to his sites drops off a cliff down to whatever trickle Yahoo and Bing bring in (unles she blocks them too).
I always thought his name should Ruprecht (from "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels")