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.
It's as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...but no one cared.
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 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.
Actually - since something of negative value was lost - value was gained ;)
_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.
Not necessarily.
Let us assume for the time being that the Times' website is losing money hand over fist. This is a perfectly valid assumption - hell, the print version of the times hasn't made money in years.
In which case, switching to a paid subscription will do a few things:
1. Drastically reduce traffic to the website. This may actually be a good thing because it means all of a sudden the amount of infrastructure (and associated cost) required to host it will plummet.
2. Give a consistent, known amount of revenue per reader. Mr. Murdoch probably only needs a few thousand customers worldwide for it to have been worthwhile - and if he's got any brains at all, he'll have streamlined the operation such that news that is printed is selected and brought into the website in a fairly automatic process which means the site just sits there doing its thing 90% of the time. Considering the amount it costs to buy a UK paper abroad (usually three or four times the cover price, assuming you can find one and it isn't a week old), there may well be enough ex-pats who think that £2/week is a good deal.
Put another way, do you as a /. reader think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot? He's an idiot who is almost certainly worth about a million times what you are, and I guarantee quite a few businesses which put news content on the web will be watching this very closely. If he's right (and I accept it's a big if), he'll turn the website from a loss-leader into a quiet little machine that just sits in the corner ticking over and making a fair bit of money. Once that happens, there won't be a quiet movement of other news sites going pay-as-you-read. There'll be a stampede.
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 will backfire. Say all news sites decide to immediately join and not have a single article on the Net. Nature abhors a vacuum. Someone will come in and fill the gap, be it more firms discussing how nifty the latest gadget is, or political figures will start sites and call them news.
I can see a political mouthpiece taking advantage of a dearth of news by filling in the vacuum with his/her rhetoric. His or her site would go from what it is now, to expanding to fill the void. It would have local chapters to get news in cities and states, E-mail, chat, and social networking, and end up being a "one stop shop" for almost anything.
End result: True news sites that try to obey journalistic integrity get pushed to the side, and mainstream news becomes run by the political pundits.
People want something to read on the Internet in the morning, and if the news sites refuse to provide this, then someone will, and it likely will be someone who has political gains by doing so.
I don't consider it a threat, I consider it a gift.
This space available.
Actually I'd say it's more like those membership stores like Costco that make you pay a fee for the privilege of shopping there.
It's admittedly successful, but that's only because there are certain people that while a relatively small percentage of the total population, can be relied upon to be so stupid as to not only submit to such treatment but to do it happily and regularly.
Similar business model when it comes to Fox News.
This space available.
Or it will simply make people read BBC (which is most likely way at the top already) more often; considering they are also one of the most sensible news services on the web, I can see only benefits.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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 problem is the quality of what they are reporting is so low now days most people who would pay for it are too distracted by video's of monkeys shitting on youtube to buy it anymore.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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
So the "web news" will cease to be the traditional, journalistic news, and will be replaced by casual "bloggers"?
I think there is a chance that this strategy will work. Considering that Mr. Murdoch has traditionally been a smart and cunning business man, I think he expects this too.
However, nothing remains the same forever, and better models may evolve. Therefore, to think that this would spell the end of the free Interwebs or society or anything like that is just plain stupid. For instance, it may come to pass that some publishers would like to expand their market share, so they may make deals with aggregators to offer "teasers" and deep-link to their content as loss-leaders--but this time at more reasonable terms for them, so that both sides make money out of it.
>> People want something to read on the Internet in the morning,
You forget one thing, there was a time when people didn't have "something to read on the Internet in the morning," yet the world turned, the sun rose and set, and people purchased subscriptions of bought their newspapers at the corner newsstand. The fact that there was always a guy at the traffic light giving out his self-published periodical for free did not much sway those that wanted more substantive and professional publications.
People only want something to read on the Internet in the morning for free, because currently it is free; they are just used to this. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that this is not sustainable, so it may change soon. People will adapt and the world will continue turning, the sun rising and setting, and someone will make money.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Murdoch has exited the Forbes top 100. Except nobody noticed, because only his pay sites mentioned it at all.
I believe this is what he is currently planning on doing. It shows that he is putting his money where his mouth is, for all those, in Slashdot or elsewhere, who demanded that he do this in order to prove that it wasn't just the loud musings of a crazy old fart.
He may be crazy, but he is showing that he really believes in what he is saying, and is willing to explore non-traditional means in order to find a viable business model for web publication.
Even if this proves successful, it is still A Good Thing; he is not decrying the advent of the Internet and claiming that newspapers have a right to exist (he could just get out of the Internet completely and try to survive off-line, but he is not doing this). He is actually embracing the Internet, or trying to. In essence, he is confirming with his actions that traditional print media may be obsolete and that the Internet is the new medium to exploit; it is just a matter of finding the proper, sustainable business model.
We have not yet, and this may not be it, but I am positive that whatever model arises eventualy, it will not be free-for-all, come-as-you-go, user-generated, hippie-lovey content.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
bid farewell to our old news overlords.
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.
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)
Actually I'd say it's more like those membership stores like Costco that make you pay a fee for the privilege of shopping there.
It's admittedly successful, but that's only because there are certain people that while a relatively small percentage of the total population, can be relied upon to be so stupid as to not only submit to such treatment but to do it happily and regularly.
Similar business model when it comes to Fox News.
Costco = Fox News?
Worst. Analogy. Ever.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I don't think that, but I do think it's possible for someone to be smart about some things, and not terribly knowledgeable or understanding of something else. One of the issues the Internet has had since its explosion has been the number of established industries (and successful people associated with those industries) that suddenly found it a threat. These people, from studio bosses to booksellers, weren't idiots, they got where they were by knowing their industries inside out, but how to deal with the free flow of information itself became a particular issue they were ill-equipped to manage.
Murdoch, thus far, has a terrible record with the Internet. While Fox News might have more viewers than CNN or MSNBC, its website is one of the least popular. While Murdoch can't be blamed, given the recentness of the acquisition, for the WSJ's low presence compared to, say, the NYT, the UK situation is staggering with the Guardian's website attracting 37 million unique visitors every month, vs the Time's less than 20M. Try as I may, I can't think of a single online operation primarily managed by Murdoch that's attracted any serious level of serious success compared to its direct rivals.
It's possible Murdoch will turn that around, but it's hard to see how removing your sites from Google and discouraging bloggers from deep linking can help you in the short or long term. Even if the aim is to change every hundred free readers into one paying subscriber and become successful that way, is it probable that this would work? Is the Times of such perceived high quality by a substantial number of people that those people would chose it and chose to pay for it over a high quality free alternative like The Guardian? Can The Times survive if the only people reading it are those who have already heard of it, and haven't gotten into the habit of reading an easier to find quality news website?
Do I think Murdoch "gets" the Internet? No. I suspect News International will, eventually, figure out how to work with it, but it may require an individual who knows more than centralized media to do it. Murdoch, just about, knows centralized media. Even there, his skills tend to be overstated: Murdoch's business plan within centralized media has always been fairly simple: run profitable populist media enterprises (The Sun, Fox, Fox News, etc), and run one or two loss making "serious" journals to ensure he has higher level political clout. Murdoch's skills are with populist, low-end, centralized media. I wouldn't assume he knows how to monetize news on the Internet any more than I'd expect Einstein to run a movie studio.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
There are a lot of British ex-pats (5.5 million http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6210358.stm). If the Times can get one in ten to pony up for a website subscription (with kindle/iPad/iPhone access) for a quid or two a week then they will get direct income of £25m-£50m/year. I assume they can probably also get the same amount of subscribers within the country. They will probably lose any income from paper-based versions of the newspaper to these people, but sales were probably low with the ex-pats already, and most of the cost of a paper version is the paper and printing itself.
The things that derails this grand plan is the other, ad-funded, websites that will provide the same news to these people. Will The Guardian (making money from their ad-funded website) risk losing it all (£40m a year according to a post above) by becoming a paysite? Not at all.
I look forward to Murdoch's other papers going behind a paywall and effectively removing their vile rhetoric from the public internet.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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)
I guess Merdouche translated from French to English means "enema"?
Twinstiq, game news
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."
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...