Slashdot Mirror
Murdoch's UK Paywall a Miserable Failure
David Gerard writes "As part of his war against free, Rupert Murdoch put the Times and Sunday Times of London behind a paywall. Michael Wolff of Newser asks how that's working out for him. You can guess: miserable failure: 'Not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself — who have free access to the site — are not going beyond the registration page. It's an empty world.' Not that this wasn't entirely predictable." Update: 07/17 01:41 GMT by T : Frequent contributor Peter Wayner writes skeptically that the Newsday numbers should be looked at with a grain of salt: "I believe they were charging $30/month for the electronic edition and $25/month for the dead tree edition which also offered free access to the electronic edition. In essence, you had to pay an extra $5 to avoid getting your lawn littered with paper. The dead tree edition gets much better ad rates and so it is worth pushing. It's a mistake to see the raw numbers and assume that the paywall failed."
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahaha! Hahahahaha! LOL!
This experiment has been tried over the last few decades (ever since the papers discovered the commercial Internet) and has failed miserably every time. Some magazines/papers even closed their doors after they tried it because they invested too much money in something that had 0 return on investment and alienated their existing audience that was actually paying their bills.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
This is being presented as a fact, but its merely a oppinion based on insider information. No where it states any real numbers. Dont get me wrong, I dont agree with Murdoch's ways but that doesnt warrant factless bashing.
Who would have thought people would object to paying for information (or the closest Murdoch equivalent thereof; this guy owns Fox News) that is also provided for free?
As much as I would love to see this fail, it's still early days in this projects inception, and I don't think they were expecting it to massively take off anyway. The paywall proper has only been in effect a few weeks, maybe better marketing and a better price point (I think £1 a day is too much for digitally delivered content, especially if the actual print edition is the same price!).
An interesting piece by David Mitchell at the Guardian as to why he would like to see this succeed is worth a read.
jaymz
It's doing exactly what it was designed to (although making it hard for legitimate subscribers to access the content sounds like it needs tweaking). The crashing failure is the business model. What Murdoch seems to have not understood is that while he can put up the price of the paper product and only lose a small proportion of his customers, sothe difference between a price of 50p and 51p is small, but on the internet the difference between 0p and 1p is huge.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The Times / Sunday Times used to have a paid archive on CD-ROM circa 1992. On the internet, there were no articles over about a week old IIRC, the articles went into those CD-ROM archives. There was no great demand for that either, so the whole concept of charging got ditched and they got advertisers to relaunch a free expanded website.
I wonder that now that it's a paid for website, how the advertisers feel about the massive drop in people being able to view their ads (assuming you're not crunching the ads with plug-ins for the likes of Firefox).
Take Nobody's Word For It.
In other news - water is (usually) wet, deserts are (usually) dry, and The TaxMan Cometh!
The world is FULL of idiots.
Even rich ones.
Lemme give the man a (free, even) clue: On the one side, he wants to *get paid* for all the Free News his "papers" are putting onto "the web". On the other hand he completely ignores all the FREE EYEBALLS that search engines like Google bring to his website.
While incessantly whining about people who 'want something for nothing', what he actually does is treat "free eyeball traffic" as being "worth nothing". Small Wonder His Website No Longer Gets Eyeballs.
Murdock: HEY GOOGLE, STOP SENDING EYEBALLS TO MY WEBSITE without paying me for my content
Google: You had me at "stop sending eyeballs to my website" - all you had to do was ask.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
If it costs to read news, people go to competitor's website. But even if all the major news sources began doing that, they wouldn't get the subscribers they want. There would be a few bloggers who would subscribe and post (even) more dramatic, (even) more provocative and (even) less accurate descriptions of the events and people would read those blogs. If the subcribtion costs would skyrocket, even the bloggers wouldn't subscribe.
I think that the best shot for traditional news media is to take advantage this: People want to pay for what they appreciate. I wouldn't want to buy an expensive subscribe to a magazine from which I read one or two articles a day on most days. But let's say that each article had "Thanks" button that costs 15 cents to click? I think I would click that pretty often. (Perhaps a drop down menu to donate even larger sums to some articles) Add some "20 cents to comment" cost and - if it rocks your boat - a bit of social media like qualities so you can see what articles your friends, favorite politicians, etc. saw as worth supporting.
Oh, maaaan, Slashdot, this is so, so, wrong. Lookit:
Michael Wolff was paid a huge sum to write a bio of Murdoch a few years back, "The Man Who Owns the News." It ended up becoming the "Heaven's Gate" of publishing: Wolff was paid a million dollars in advance, and it sold horribly. As a result, Wolff became a pariah amongst publishers, and he has had a jones against Murdoch ever since. He started "Newser" -- an online news aggregation site, sort of a Drudge Report, but with pictures and short summaries written by semi-literate snarky hipster interns -- specifically as a response to the "old-fashioned" way that Murdoch did business. Wolff writes a column there daily; like, every third or fourth one is some screed, equal parts vitriolic and smug, predicting failure for everything Murdoch is involved with. If Murdoch issued a statement saying that "Gravity is a Good Thing," Wolff would find some way to either argue against it or poke fun at it.
Of course, it doesn't make matters any better that Wolff had an affair with one of those aforementioned interns a few years back that was made public -- and kept public, arguably far longer than an extra-marital affair involving a "C"-level journalist should have been -- by the Murdoch-owned NY Post. Wolff's wife (a divorce lawyer!! (he's obviously not the sharpest pen in the inkwell)) left him and took him to the cleaners.
Nobody who knows anything about Murdoch or NYC journalism takes anything Wolff has to say seriously when he's in "Murdoch mode." Kind of like asking the Sheriff of Nottingham to give a measured opinion about that guy "Robin Hood."
...that they probably only need a fraction of their former readers to subscribe to make the same money they were making on advertising. I doubt literally 'nobody' has subscribed and I think it's going to take a bit longer to see if they've hit the magic number where they match/surpass their previous earnings.
Maybe if he lowered the prices, he might get more customers. Even though I'm in the US, I've read timesonline on occasion, but the four dollars a week is a bit too much.
So I'm expecting the usual reaction from the Slashdot audience cheering the gloriously free nature of information on the net and our ability to stick it to the man. And don't get me wrong, I'm a (free) news junkie myself. But how sustainable is the current paradigm? . I'm asking a sincere question, as the journalists really do have to get paid eventually. Advertisers? Probably not with the click rates the way they are nowadays. I don't see any any alternative to Murdoch's vision - other than some of the micropayment schemes that have been proposed. As the media outlets adjust to the new world and figure out ways to regulate, it's hard to see how this vision is anything but inevitable.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Remember Murdoch constantly advocating that other publications go for a paywall. This is why: if he puts things behind a paywall, then he'll be creamed in the marketplace, but if everyone does it then everyone will be forced to pay somebody, thus creating a market for Internet news.
Of course, he's being an idiot, because there's this little organization called the BBC which provides very good coverage and is publicly controlled.
I am officially gone from
The front page is ok, but clicking a few links resulted in a weird glitch-style reload. After a few goes, a login page came up, with a redirect to the subscription page. 2 quid a week is an OK price, but I agree with petes POV. The biz model is tanking, not the paywall.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
I'm not paying for newspapers as it is - I can find a dozen abandonned editions of the day of any given local paper in the subway and in food courts on any day of the week. Why would I pay for the web version of something I already get for free?
If its one thing I've learned in a few years of being involved in the journalistic trade...it's that so many people in it are pigheaded to the point of doing themselves a lot of damage to their potential success and reputation. This is true from editors, to rank and file columnists...and new graduates convert alarmingly to this mentality with a dissapointing number of exceptions.
Murdoch aside, the overriding truth of modern journalist both here in the UK and in the US is that quantity rules over quality. That's why every Saturday and Sunday we Britons cannot buy a 'quality broadsheet' without having to acquire a book's worth of text in supplements along with the actual newspaper itself. That one has to shell over £1.20 or so for a compendium of tripe that you mostly won't get around to reading is why journalism is failing.
Simply put there are too many people employed who may have begun with some talent, but have lapsed into a state of passive drudgery writing filler columns about inane topics most readers could not care less about. You can actually tell with a lot of them that the author wasn't really thinking as he or she typed it out. In short the 'news' of newspaper is absent in a woefully high proportion; yes there's room for editorials and quirky opinion pieces...but the proportions are way off right now.
This is true of all Murdoch rags, most starkly The Times which was a pioneer of supplements in the 1990s. Once, decades ago (pre-Murdoch), the Times led some of the most intriguing investigative departments in journalistic history - they spent months to break a story that would spread across what? Four pages or so of print? This level of work for that amount of journalism is unheard of today - that's because today it's all about cheap, easy stories that can be summed up mostly as: 'Churnalism' (a term coined by Guardian journo Nick Davies) . It began in earnest in the 1980s with Andrew Neil's Times, and the trend away from reportage which took effort, talent, dedication and downright brilliance to pull off is almost entirely absent in The Times of 2010.
There is hope for the profession, as wracked by disease as it is; online journalism has some good offerings where journalists actually leave the office and do some old school reporting. That Murdoch and a few others see their awful, soulless content as worthy of paying for online rather than just going for what's worked since the beginning (advertisements) is telling of their wrongheaded approach which led so many publications to become so degraded in quality.
in charge of the movie, music, television, book, and print media industries, you have these guys who clawed their way to the top in an era of typewriters and cassette tapes and celluloid and NTSC and stopping the presses. the golden age of media
which the internet has killed
but these guys have invested decades of their lives in a status quo which went **POOF**, just when they get the point where they are at the helm
naturally, they are bitter. they've been screwed by history. they call it disruptive technology for a reason
so the rest of us will have to suffer awhile while these media dinosaurs hem and haw and throw chairs and grow purple faced and otherwise rage against the dying if the light. and then they're dead, and then those working in the media trenches now with a firm grasp of what the internet actually means will finally move into power, and maybe we can put all of this clashing of the eras behind us, and all these absolutely moronic laws and policies we keep making fun of here on slashdot, for good reason
one can hope, anyways
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Murdoch's not stupid, even if he does want to fight the tide. The question is, does he genuinely want to get money from this venture or does he want a "failure" to demonstrate the need for the government (who are indebted to him for supporting them in the election and stabbing the previous governing party in the back) to lend him a hand. I think it's quite reasonable to assume that he was advised that this would be a commercial failure and decided, eyes open, that that was exactly what he wanted to advance his lobbying position.
Murdoch's in it for the very long term. He did the same thing with TV, lost stupid amounts of money over a decade, but eventually his proprietary broadcasting networks became the status quo. He's got a virtual monopoly on TV sports coverage in many countries, so there's very little option other than to pay over the odds for his TV coverage.
The troubling thing is he indirectly owns one of the bigger ISPs in the UK, and I suggest it will be part of some long term strategy to make his part of the web more locked down.
Was George W. Bush involved into the project ?!?
=======
I do not often visit The Times web site, I prefer the paper version. I do mainly if I want to share an article with a friend or few, some item of common interest. Something that has the side effect of introducing non Times readers to The Times.
I notice that I can no longer do that, it will cost me & my friends to be able to share such things. As a result, after 35 years, I will change newspaper; I will no longer buy your paper copy - probably going for the Guardian or Independent.
This paywall is a bad idea, the only way that I can adapt to it is to change which newspaper I read. Your foolish action will cost you. I give you permission to email me (once) when you reverse this policy; however I expect that, by then, I will be happy with my new newspaper.
Regards
=======
but subscribers to the paper itself — who have free access to the site — are not going beyond the registration page
Now that's interesting. How do they know that.
And this quote (sorry, I did RTFA) is interesting, because I hadn't thought of it that way:
Why would [independent publishers] talk to the Times or the Sunday Times if they are behind a paywall? Who can see it? I can't even share a link and they aren't on search. It’s as though their writers don't exist anymore.
It's sad, though. I really don't see a bright future for high-quality journalism on the Internet -- not that I'm saying anything about the quality of said papers. Writers want to be read, readers want to read, but the Internet removes both the need and opportunities for middle-men. And I don't think that ad revenue alone is enough to finance a documentary or an in-depth story.
Maybe the LWN approach is the way to go (pay-walling stories for a limited amount of time). Other than that, I think the value of news over the Internet will be restricted to shallow articles and first-person publications.
Any barrier, free or paid, between the consumer and the content will move consumers to others. If paid contact would be easier to access than free contact, many would be happy to pay.
This is why most DRM schemes have failed, except for iTunes, which makes buying music easier to do than download MP3's for free.
WSJ, FT, and Economists walls are made of swiss cheese. Could it be a reason why those sites are not shut down yet?
The web site at newser.com call in at least 21 other sites according to No_Script and Ghostery shows at least 5 trackers as well.
It's It's like going to one of those beer festivals where all the breweries are giving away free samples of their beer and setting up your booth as the only one that charges money simply because you think yours is so much better. I guess no one will ever find out.
I am a subscriber to the Times Literary Supplement. This year, I paid the supplementary 20$ to get Internet access, since I live in Canada and get the TLS with a substantial delay, and also because I was just curious given the scale of Murdoch's experiment, not talking about the scale of his pretensions.
So I am one of the very few who got past the registration page. The other side of this pay-wall allows us a peek on the dystopian nightmare that would have been the Internet if developed by corporations, and it is on a par with the current state of academic journals online. In order to undo what the Internet is meant to do, that is to hyperlink, Murdoch has spent a fortune developing a shiny interface that let us navigate through an exact reproduction of the paper thing. It is DRM by design: there is no way to copy and paste, to store, therefore to link, to annotate or to use in any meaningful sense of the word beyond a reading experience that is, as a result, as uncomfortable as it gets. The technical constraints that all this restraining impose make navigating and reading impractical and painful.
Despite the attractiveness of reading the TLS in a timely manner, I went to the site once and never repeated the experience.
As much as I love it when a billionaire faceplants, I would suggest that free-forever is not a sustainable business model either - lest those who produce the content are given free food, clothing and shelter.
Edison tried 3,000 times before he got it down, my guess is that Murdoch and his team are no less determined. One good thing to remember is that the more money he earns, the more money you could potentially earn.
Hope is the currency of fools
i listen to the cantankerous old folks bitch about it at a local tavern
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The flaw in Murdoch's strategy is that to effectively charge for something that everyone else is giving away for free, you need to convince all the other "free guys" to charge for their stuff.
This works in industries where the barriers to entry are high, but on the web, anyone can be a journalist - hell, you don't even need to know how to operate a web server any more - all you need is a hosted wordpress account and you are off to the races.
That's where Murdoch will focus his energies next - raising the barriers to entry. I can easily see this slimeball "partnering" with ISPs to restrict access to free sites. Unless we have clear regulator enforced net neutrality laws, Murdoch and his types will restrict our right to free press and force all of us to pay for his "news".
-ted
Murdoch forgot one thing: his customers are cheap cunts. At least, if the US followers of his empire are any indication.
News has a model of the world in which you buy and read one paper, as you did back in the days when there were only paper editions. The reason you only bought one paper is that as papers rose in price, it got too expensive to buy all of them. So back then, unless you were a business person who really needed them all, you would buy one and read it. However when papers went online, all of a sudden people started reading the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent and Times, all of them.
Total newspaper readership therefore rose dramatically. The model had changed. We were now in a world of non-exclusive newspaper readership, where people find it natural to glance through all the broadsheets.
Rupert would now like to turn back the clock, and have all papers go behind the paywall. However, he fails to realize that if that world were to come about, total readership would fall. He would then only have those people who were prepared to restrict themselves to the Times.
It is not that people particularly want to get their content free. They will pay for it, if its distinctive and of value to them, as the FT, Economist, and WSJ show. What they do not want however is a model in which they subscribe to a paper as in the old days. So what happened when the Times went behind the paywall is that everyone deleted that bookmark but carried on as before reading Telegraph, Guardian and Independent. They don't really need the Times, as long as the market is using the model of non-exclusive readership.
This is the critical point that Rupert is failing to get. He is trying to operate a model of the past, in a world in which non-exclusive readership has become the norm. The effect of this is going to be to take the Times out of the running. It is no longer part of the broadsheets that you glance through online. People are not going to subscribe to just one, and in a world in which only one charges, they are going to carry on scanning through the others, without particularly missing the Times, which has nothing very distinctive to offer.
Historically, News has always had a problem thinking the content issue through. Consider the case of LineOne, many years ago. The argument then was, we have all this distinctive content that we will use to force people to subscribe to our Internet Access service because that is the only way we will allow access to it. They will pay a premium for the access in order to get the content. In those days the contrary argument was made: if the content is so valuable, just sell it to anyone, regardless of who they get their access from. At which those in charge of the content rightly flinched, and admitted that it was unsaleable.
OK, then, what made them think it was saleable at a premium when bundled with access? And as it turned out, it was not, and the access business was sold off to Tiscali and the Times went online free.
They have been obsessed with the model of Sky, where they got exclusive rights, used those to sell dishes and subscriptions. But it depends on having 'must have' content. What Rupert is refusing to accept right now is that, except in the case of the WSJ, he has no 'must have' content. None. Columnists? Who cares?
As the article says, the Times has simply vanished from online. No-one links to it, no-one quotes it, as far as can be seen no-one subscribes to it. It has vanished. Give it another few months, and the effect will be the same as if it had no online presence.
Now ask yourself: if someone had gone to Rupert six months ago, and proposed closing down their web presence, would he have agreed? It would probably have been a short meeting, and a very blunt one. But that is what, probably without in the least intending to, he has now done.
Dramatically fewer people reading Murdoch's crap, and he's still not making any money.
Looks like success from where I'm sitting.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
They are too big to fail! the economy will come down, if we let newscorp empire fail!
I think as taxpayers, they deserve a bailout!
The Times has put into place 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."
Illustration: Rupert Murdoch with the precioussssssssss.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I'm trying to read the article @ The Sunday Times, but it's asking me to pay.
I actually agree with the principle of paying for stuff. As someone who doesn't think money grows on trees, I understand that journalists, photographers, columnists and editorialists expect to be paid at the end of the month.
If a website is a re-hash of other newssites or a mere Reuters aggregator, it doesn't have any value to me.
If a website provides high quality articles, then it's a matter of how much am I willing to pay to access the information.
Murdoch supposedly said once "content is king". I totally agree. And I'll pay for it.
The reason why it probably worked for those publications is because they target an elite audience who finds a subscription to such things a triviality and/or a business expense to be written off.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
No, the economist IS far right. Libertarian and far-right have been merged, both because they *espouse* "small government" but merely as an opposition to "small corporation". They both want government to be replaced by corporations and want them AS BIG AS POSSIBLE. Hence, the Mil-Ind complex gets big spending: though "big government", this benefits companies not government, making the government the one-stop-shop for company profiles.
They aren't skeptical of the proposed MEASURES because they only asked RHETORICAL "would they be effective?" just so that NOTHING WOULD BE DONE. Because that would be interference by government in company business. A very far right thing to do.
"Being skeptical is not necessarily 'denying'" Indeed they aren't. The IPCC scientists are skeptical of the papers supporting AGW. But to deny the evidence is not skepticism. And despite all the evidence, the Economist still doesn't think there's enough proof. This is DENIAL.
Can we clear this up once and for all, the newspaper in question is called The Times, not The London Times, or the Times of London. Other newspapers with the word Times in their name do so because they are named after The Times
Dum spiro spero
Based on the summary, I don't see evidence that his decision was a failure. The results prove that the vast majority of traffic to the sites was from non-subscribers, and that these users aren't willing to pay. Okay. Less traffic means less ability to sell advertising on the web site, which means less revenue. But was the web site profitable to begin with? How much can be saved in reduced web development work and lower operating costs due to the vastly smaller amount of visitors?
If the web site was profitable before and now isn't, or is less so, then yes this was a failure. But if it was losing money before and is now losing less, despite having so many fewer visitors, then maybe its a net win.
I guess we'll find out if/when he decides to reverse that decision. Bottom line, dude is in it for the money. If this is hurting his bottom line he'll recant.
Consumer Reports is another periodical website that uses the subscription model (though in that case it is because they don't accept advertising so their reviews can be truly independent). What they have in common with WSJ, Economist and various scientific/medical journals is that they offer highly specialized data to a niche market that is willing to pay a premium for it. General interest newspapers and magazines do not fall into that category which is why the advertising-based model works much better for them.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I crack the DVD content and it's turnkey simple. No, I don't have Sony (though I would have their plain old TVs: no DRM on them, as long as I don't get HDCP connectors). Don't get BluRay, so right there too. I don't buy movies, I buy DVDs which come with just a copy of the movie, not the movie in toto, and DEFINITELY not the publishing umbrella company, so not sure what you're saying there...
Note I'm not the OP, but I don't have a TV and don't watch iPlayer BBC content because of the DRM.
"I pay the license fee, and people who weasel out of it on a technicality piss me off."
I don't have to have a license for iPlayer. The OP say they don't have a TV, so they don't need a license either. It's not a technicality, it's the law.
"You admittedly watch TV"
No, he said he didn't have a TV for years. What may be happening is he was paying the license DESPITE THIS, just because news.bbc.co.uk was good:
"but I thought that the license fee was worth the money to support news.bbc.co.uk - it worked out cheaper than a daily newspaper"
Which reads like "I paid the license for the non-license-requiring news site because I felt I should". Nothing about watching TV (which would be hard to do without a TV...).
"you admittedly enjoy the output of the BBC"
Yes, However, not wanting a TV license doesn't mean he has to not like the BBC. Band Of Brothers was good and was output of the BBC. Maybe he bought the DVD, maybe he never watched it except around a friends' place, maybe he's never seen it but heard good things about it. NONE of which requires he buy a TV license.
But no, you have a stick up your arse about non-TV-license payers who legally do not have to have a TV license and ASSUME he's ripping the BBC off by pirating the telly.
Utter fail.
HitWise have graphs that show the decline in market share following the paywall implementation. It shows that The Telegraph (also a slightly right of centre broadsheet) picked up traffic as the Times declined.
What is interesting is that a week after the paywall, there were still users navigating to the website to be confronted with the paywall page - probably because they were being linked to the site from other sites or were using book marks. As they realise that The Times is paywalled, they are not going back.
On non-economic topics, why would you expect them to be any better than your local newspaper?
The thing is, there are huge and far-reaching implications economic depending on how much humanity needs to adjust carbon output. So a magazine like the economist would, naturally, seek to fully vette theories that are going to drive major policy changes.
There are very few topics at this point in time that are not at the core economic issues, because everything impacts government policy and regulation these days.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It appears that the quality of the WSJ reporting has declined since Murdoch took over. Most of the serious economists that want hard data and serious analysis have fled the WSJ and moved to the FT. The reason is simple: The WSJ is no longer providing the material that it used to. On the other hand I think the Bancroft Family took the best advice for the stock market when selling the paper: Buy Low, Sell High.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Rupert and Son have been travelling the world making a lot of noise about copyright and "unfair competition" for the last couple of years and amoung other things those that listened seriously cut back BBC news online in response. This latest paywall effort is about making more noise and he doesn't really care much if his newspapers bleed a little more money while he rakes in the TV, movie and even ISP cash. All this noise is about making life difficult for competitors for the advertising dollar - he really wants to influence enough people to pass laws that will kick google in the teeth.
He's an old bastard but not a stupid one or even out of touch. He's always operated with a collection of experts on any topic that will get him commercial advantage, and on the internet side he bought an ISP in 1993. I hate the guy since he bought a controlling share and gutted a software company I worked for in 2000, but he's no idiot and he's playing a game to influence governments to tightly control the internet to raise the condition of entry to where eventually only very large companies can compete.
He's playing the game to damage google and stop anything like it from emerging from a small start ever again
Yes I noted in the last paragraph of my post that there are indeed good offerings to be found online. The red-tops never were quality; my post was aimed at those that do bill themselves as quality but are anything but. The paywalling is just an appalling, but oddly logical, end to the mentality of those who've turned journalism away from principle and towards profit.
You're spot on about the regurgitation - there are journalists, often younger ones who actually were interested and optimistic as they learned contextual stuff in university who are now employed to recycle stuff from the Press Association/Associated Press/Reuters wire all day long. It is the most boring, efficient way a young person can kill off any geniune like for the job; for them the trade is defined by repetitive soul destroying work rather than creativity or satisfaction. It isn't anything approaching passion after a year or two of suffering that.
Frankly I wouldn't blame any graduate now to avoid fixed employment altogether and make his or her chief aim to build a reputation as a competant, talented freelancer. Blogging and online journalism is one way to do this; getting out there and doing your own stories unique to you, making calls and getting a few contacts in the local press offices can be a good start.
Highest renown often goes to the talented; journalism has a history of awarding talent with recognition. Don't bother going into it unless you were told by your teachers, family, friends etc that you had a knack for words and you personally feel you could make it. If you feel your personality squares with journalism then by all means enter the profession with all the individualism you can muster as that trait is always needed. Don't expect to make much money in the formative years; it takes time until you can command a fair income.
Good books to read to clue in are Andrew Marr's 'My Trade' and Nick Davies's 'Flat Earth News' , if you like humour look up Benji the binman on Google. Nick's book is brutally honest and far closer to how it works today than Marr's nostalgic, historical, professorish work which is nevertheless decent.
If the site was smartly built the paper subscribers shouldn't have to go through a registration process at all.
Type in your choice of unique identifier - subscriber number off the label, home phone number, OR credit card number.
"We found a matching subscription - is this you? Yes/No"
Slap a cookie on the browser - done. No password required.
Yes, someone could fake their way in using just this info, but compared to people not using the site AT ALL it's a minimal concern. If there's a feature on the site that involve some one-off charges THEN you hit the user up for harder verification. Otherwise, keep it simple.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
That means:
1. NO ADVERTISING. If you advertise, particularly the annoying, video and sound (with those extra annoying pop-up - or worse pop-out crap), your customers are the advertisers and my attention is what you are selling. Why should I have to pay you so that you can IRRITATE and ANNOY me by selling MY attention? NO. Adverising is a great, perfectly fine way to pay for FREE content. It is NOT an acceptable way to make some extra money on top of what you charge me.
2. NO TRACKING ME. Again, if I am paying you for a service, that means I don't want you to invade myprivacy. You don't track what I read or when. No record keeping of anything I do. You are allowed to count how many people click on a story, but not whether the same person clicks on story X as also clicks on story Y.
3. Video and sound should all be accompanied by printed summaries. Deaf people (and blind people using text-to speech converter programs) are important customers too and some of us don't like the video - it takes too much time, is lazy, and if I wanted that I would turn on the TV.
4. Better, in depth writing that does not accept stupid statements. Don't just accept statements, VERIFY them. (i.e. treat each of the people you quote the way Politifact.org does and when they give numbers make sure they are telling the truth.) When someone says something really stupid like "this snow storm in the heart of winter disproves global warming", call them on it YOURSELF, don't simply get an opposing point of view.
The Internet did not kill newspaper, a combination of poor writing and advertisers did (the advertisers would rather spend 5 cents to talk sell diapers to pregnant women than 10 cents to sell diapers to everyone). Those same forces rule the internet news market - as long as you let them. If you want to recreate the pay-news market, you need to avoid the problems that killed the newspaper.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
So why do they go Off Topic then? If they aren't supposed to be read for this, why do they waste time and money and effort and space, all of which could be done discussing things that are ON TOPIC?
Because they're selling the corporate dream: the corporation is always right and government should butt out.
This is editorialism and politicisation. Both of which it is completely appropriate to call the Economist out on.
While the subscription service may or may not be failing, it's important to remember that Michael Wolff runs Newser and Newser wants to get all of its content for FREE. So he naturally wants the paywalls to fail because if they work he won't find anything to aggregate. He'll actually have to pay the reporters himself. Please keep this bias in mind.
And the Newsday example with 35 subscribers is also flawed because the newspaper threw in the online version for free with a paid subscription to the dead tree edition and the dead tree edition was CHEAPER than the online because it was subsidized by ads. Naturally most people chose the cheaper option.
Previously all the papers used the AP/Reuters because the AP covered issues the local paper couldn't. No one cared that everyone used the AP because people didn't read out of state newspapers.
Now the model has shifted. Everyone can read anyone's newspapers, but everyone is annoyed that all you get from any "local" newspaper is the same AP feed (some who charge for it and some who do not). I can see that small papers dropping the AP feed because it isn't useful to them any more. The bandwidth cost to carry information that everyone else has isn't worth it. Then the paper becomes a "local paper" or a "niche paper" again that can justify charging for its content. It will be able to charge because it is covering things that are locally important that you can't get anywhere else.
The AP on the other hand is going to have a problem: With all the small papers dropping them as a source of revenue, they will have to find another way to support themselves. I don't know what that is but they will have to scramble to get it done.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
"We in the UK pay for the BBC willingly "
This is untrue, if you don't pay you are marched to the magistrate's court and fined or imprisoned.
You can chose not to watch live TV, but that is not a realistic option for most sane people (spare the "there is nothing on TV" nonsense, with PVRs you can watch quality TV only if you so wish, specially in the UK where quality is not bad and where we get only the best shows from the US and other countries (If you are missing the Swedish version of Wallander in BBC4 you are a real mutt).
Because there are less people reading the Times, fewer publicists are directing people to be interviewed at the Times. If you know people are reading the Guardian and not the Times and you want to get your message out, you go to the Guardian because more eyes are going to see your message. That is going to set up a feedback loop where people say "hey, the guardian has more content than the Times does, why am I reading the times." Then fewer people produce content for the Times, fewer people read the Times, etc etc etc.
It is hard to develop a user base when you seem to be actively driving away readers and by extension the people who develop your content.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Why don't I pay for content behind a paywall?
Well, apart from the selfish adverseness to paying up common to every other greedy human being, I find micropayment based paywalls to be nothing but a major hassle.
A flat monthly subscription fee combined with one time login would be much more attractive.
It keeps the Murdoch's away?
You've clearly posted in the wrong article. Sadly, you're still +3 informative.
Murdoch's terrible Faux News was on the TV in the bar last night and gees, if anyone would have talked about Bush when he was in office the way Murdoch's "news" station talks about Obama, Faux News and the neocons would have called them "traitors" and screamed bloody murder.
That's absolutely correct. He wants to tell people what to think and when to think it. And gets outraged when they don't comply.
It's only sad for Murdoch, to me this is just a sign that my /.fu is strong.
You can't handle the truth.
He won't probably stay around for much longer. It's a ghastly thing to wish for somebody's death, but the world will be a better place once Rupert Murdoch is gone.
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i heartily agree with your better statement of the problem than mine
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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for rubbish content.
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Why should I pay a "news" organization which openly claims that it is has the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports?
http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=23679
But FUCK RUPERT MURDOCH with the rotting corpses of every single one of the Fox News talking heads that he is using to turn the US populace into brain damaged morons
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Hmm... as a USAican, I say that phrase as 'head over heels'. Was that a typo or another example of two peoples separated by a common language?
Get your ass to Mars.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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Its Ailes, Roger Ailes. The hyper-partisan republican hack, who Murdoch uses to extort the wealthy, or anyone else with even a little cash, to drive his advertising rental business.
If you are suffering from past 10 years of that I'm sure you're eager run out and get yourself a paying subscription, at least now you know what ails you.
They have their own cable networks so you can get subscriptions to those as well, even by gift-cards for friends and family.
These people have no limits the insatiable appetite that is their greed knows no bounds. Even governments bow before them.
I am very glad to hear of Mr. Murdoch's failure.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
I thought most people in the UK read the BBC News Website daily and rarely go to newspaper Web sites? I know I do and if I want to read other angles on a story, I go to a UK news aggregator like UK Google News or News Now. I never used The Times Website before it went paywall and I'm sure that's the case for almost everyone else out there too. It'll be interesting to see what happens when The Sun goes paywall - that demographic might not be smart enough to realise where the BBC/Google/NewsNow sites are :-)
Why would I pay to read news from a "news" organization that has argued that it has a right to deliberately lie or distort the news to suit its advertisers? http://www.purefood.org/rbgh/akre022603.cfm If I want to read fiction I will go to a site that tells me that it is fiction - and be willing to pay for that.
The Murdoch model that has worked in the UK and Australia and has been less successful in the US is to buy enough of the media outlets to have real political power - and to use it to obtain concessions (ie monopolies) that allow him to dominate the home entertainment media market. He has had no compunctions about slanting the news to suit his political ends - not only to suit advertisers - while claiming that his editors have editorial independence. It is notable that all but one of the Murdoch newspapers were strongly in favour of the war in Iraq - the exception being in Papua New Guinea! Now that it is easy to compare several news sources his technique works less well. It is notable that he failed to give the Tories an outright majority in the UK. Had he done so I'm pretty sure it would have been curtains for the BBC. With the Libdems holding a balance of power that's less likely to happen but I've no doubt he'll try. On the other hand the Times Crossword is be best I know! Sad that it has to be in such a lousy "news" source.
Ok right at the top of this 'journalists' article:
Will his paywall work is the biggest story in the media business, and it would be quite a journalistic coup to document the progress, or lack thereof, that's being made in trying to convince a skeptical world to shell out 2£ ($3) a week for what's heretofore been free.
If this is the kind of crap that 'free' journalism produces I'd gladly pay for something written by someone who can actually construct readable sentences...
This guy is a blogger who likes to think he is a journalist. Ehm... like most of them I guess...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Did he really think anyone wants to pay for his awful news? I'm glad it's failing.
I think most of the Free World would have preferred rather more conclusive evidence of Cheney's death beyond the possibility of resuscitation in this or any other universe before tripping the hammer on George II. Tossing his carcass into the centre of the crater of an active volcano, immediately after DNA matching and continuous video coverage from that point until said carcass sinks into the lava seems a reasonable minimum, given that nuclear atomization has certain additional, undesirable side effects. But you get the idea.
News is available all over the internet for free.
Why would anyone pay to read it just at one site?
I read BBC News and The Guardian. I'm not a great fan of the new BBC News site though.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
They would have done the same thing to Obama, but they didn't. He's even less qualified than she is.
"as such the so-called "Independent voters" broke for Obama."
Actually, they had already moved to Obama during the Democratic Primary. Palin was a bit of a "hail mary" for McCain, clearly it was not done with the proper vetting. It was either going to be a home run or it would explode. It exploded. Even Republicans didn't support her as a VP choice.
"Senate Democrats did not vote for the Iraq War because they believed in it"
They believed in them as much as Republicans did. And I mean that every way possible.
The Democrats are every bit as culpable for the mistake called Iraq as the Republicans. Every bit.
Coming from "off the top" of your trolling head is actually and truly the bottom of the barrell, silanea. Get over yourself, because you're one of the most unintelligent idiots around this website, bar-none.