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."

Comments

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[paiute]

Exactly. Nobody pays for single academic papers online at the publisher (well, maybe a few idiots I guess).

Well slap my rump and call me a nobody idiot. Actually, there are many journals we don't use enough to justify an annual institutional subscription. I might need 5-10 papers a year from a journal. Subscription cost might be $10,000. Price for 10 individual papers might be $300 or so at most. It often makes more sense to buy individual articles.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[Zemran]

There are very good alternatives.
www.guardian.co.uk
www.dailymail.co.uk
and of course news.bbc.co.uk ... why would anyone miss one option? I think he may do even worse than you suggest... I certainly agree that he has no chance of retaining 10% of his current visitors.

try a newspaper that has an API, not a paywall...

[robertito]

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)

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[ozbon]

The Daily Mail is *not* a good alternative. It's another hate-filled shitrag of bigotry and clashing themes ("We pay too much to live here, so we need to hire cheap labour" vs "oh no, not immigrants", for example)

I'd agree that the other two are good sources of news, but the Mail? Fuck, they still whine on about conspiracy theories for killing the Princess of Wales. And it still sells papers.

Relying on the Daily Mail for news is like relying on Fox News for level-headed commentary.