News Corp Will Charge For Newspaper Websites 453
suraj.sun writes "Rupert Murdoch says having free newspaper websites is a 'flawed' business model. Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a 'malfunctioning' business model. Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an 'epochal' debate over whether to charge. 'That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal's experience,' he said."
Another smart move from the movers and shakers.... (Score:5, Funny)
Rupert Murdoch says having free newspaper websites is a 'flawed' business model. Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a "malfunctioning" business model.
On the other hand, everytbody knows that charging for something that everyone else provides for free is a winning strategy.
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, he does cite the Wall Street Journal, I'm not sure how "booming" they actually are but he at least has an example to back up this move.
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who buy the trash in paper form are rapidly disappearing however, mostly because they can find the same level of garbage online, for free.
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Wall Street Journal isn't your typical newspaper, it's very nearly a technical journal that is required reading for people of a certain profession. The Journal doesn't report the same news that every other paper does, and it doesn't just rely on AP and Reuters feeds to do the work for them, it actually offers things that are nearly unique in the news industry. That, and only that, is why they can get away with a pay wall.
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of the same things can be said of the New York Times. And if you've read the WSJ lately, it has been diluted with entertainment news, sports news(this is not to denigrate sports, just to show that the WSJ is becoming just like other papers), and all the other things that make it par for the course for a Murdoch publication.
No, something else besides level of technicality needs to explain why people are willing to pay for the WSJ.
Here's a possibility: as another reader pointed out, you are allowed to access WSJ's premium content if you have been referred from another site. So what you are really paying for is the indexing of content at the WSJ site, and the ability to read the content which you can otherwise get for free the same way you would read a newspaper.
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The D section of the WSJ still has original stories. Becky Quick who is now on CNBC used to write there some years back. all her stories were orginal and not AP reprints
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of the same things can be said of the New York Times.
Some perhaps, but not many. The venerable grey lady is a pale shadow of her former self and doesn't really hold a candle to the WSJ which is a much meatier paper with much more information value for the money.
No, something else besides level of technicality needs to explain why people are willing to pay for the WSJ.
The Wall Street journal has good original articles on many non-technical and even non financial subjects (their political opinion page, for example, is often witty and insightful). In fact, I would argue that if one were interested in a strictly technical paper then there are even better (and more terse) papers out there that basically cater only to the financial services industry, The Financial Times [ft.com] for example. Also, the audience of the WSJ tends to be upper middle class and higher income which means that they have money to spend and like spending it on fine living so the WSJ attracts more and better high-end advertisers who will pay premiums for access to that upper-crust audience.
Here's a possibility: as another reader pointed out, you are allowed to access WSJ's premium content if you have been referred from another site.
This has been tried before so its not a new idea. The folks at Salon [salon.com] once tried "24 hour day passes" if users would view an ad from one of their advertising sponsers. This was back when Salon was trying to position itself as an "ultra-premium" online magazine that was "paying members only". They no longer do this, so it must not have been too successful.
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The Financial Times is essentially the British version of the Wall Street Journal. Different publisher, but it covers the same niche in a different geographical market.
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which only won 5 Pulitzer Prizes last month?
Which is awarded by a liberal New York university (Columbia) with a board that skews left (with a few token exceptions). The Wall Street Journal is hands down a better paper than New York Times and the sales and circulation numbers prove it. The opinion on the Financial Times is mostly just my own, but I also read and enjoy the Economist (another British publication) and I find the British style of financial journalism to have a more international appeal than what is usually found in the WSJ which tends to
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Can we also make MSNBC and CNN pay per view too? Those are just as biased as Fox News.
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they're 10% reporters, and 90% commentators. There's more concrete information in 30 minutes of any nightly network world news broadcast than in several hours of cable "news" broadcasting, depending on when you happen to tune in. From Larry King to Keith Olbermann, to Bill Orielly, it's almost always a bunch of bluster about shit that ultimately doesn't affect a viewer at all.
And it's not for a lack of news. If these channels expanded their definition of newsworthy events to include more than just the US federal government, celebrity news, and missing blonde girls, they would be more worried about trying to fit it all into an hour instead of just trying to find more filler material.
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Journal doesn't report the same news that every other paper does, and it doesn't just rely on AP and Reuters feeds to do the work for them, it actually offers things that are nearly unique in the news industry. That, and only that, is why they can get away with a pay wall.
Considering that the business model for free online newspapers is unsustainable, and paper news is dying out, that implies that eventually all newspapers will be behind a pay wall. If, as you say, the only way for a news paper to thrive behind a pay wall is to offer very high quality unique content, that would imply that in the future all newspapers will offer high quality unique content. That sounds pretty nice.
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:5, Interesting)
The question is what the Wall Street Journal provides that people are paying for. Mr. Murdoch seems to think that people are paying for access to the general newspaper sections that are shared with other papers - global news, national news, op-eds. I strongly suspect that he is wrong, that subscribers are paying primarily for the financial news. If I am right, then this model cannot be easily expanded to other newspapers.
Re:WSJ (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WSJ (Score:5, Informative)
[citation needed]
OK [latimes.com]
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:5, Funny)
What does Murdoch know about making money, anyway?
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:5, Interesting)
What does Murdoch know about making money, anyway?
I don't know. But I know this: it sets off alarm bells ringing when somebody claims that a business model which has been evolving for nearly two decades is 'malfunctioning' just because it's not working in precisely the way in which they personally want it to work.
Believing that the universe revolves around you may be a useful trait for someone determined to push their agenda onto the world, and make money whilst doing so. But I don't think for a second that makes those people right - just powerful.
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:5, Insightful)
What business model? Newspapers pay out the ass to create content, put it online for free, hemorrhage subscribers, and go broke? It's very Web 2.0, I'll give you that.
I think he's right. They're not gaining enough from putting it online for free to justify continuing the experiment. Our (I work for a newspaper) own numbers are still going up, but they're not going up enough...The online revenue isn't going to stabilize at a level that's high enough to allow the business to continue.
I've been harping on flipping the pay model for a while: right now a lot of papers charge for archival data...Stuff that's old, and has a very limited earnings potential...And give away the current stuff for free. If you flip that, and charge for anything in depth for the last 14 days(or so), and then release everything older than that for free, you keep your internet revenue stream, while still driving a viable pay product.
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Part of the problem is the obscenely high rates newspapers charge for ads on their websites. Where I work, we do media buys, and often get quoted prices over $10 CPM. With click-through rates usually under 0.2%, the advertising is ridiculously over-priced -- so no one who doesn't have very deep pockets buys it. I imagine most of their advertising is remenant ads bought in bulk by large corporations.
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Associated Press. Associated. Most of the stories that go on news services were written by local newspapers who subscribe to those services...That's the whole point. When you get an AP story from bumfuck illinois, do you really think that the AP has an office there? That they're going to waste their time sending a reporter there?
The AP and Reuters employ very few reporters in comparison to the organizations who feed them their content.
Anyway, the AP was talking about requiring payment months ago. [slashdot.org] I posted in that thread as well, and, among other things, predicted that newspapers would, again, start charging for their web content [slashdot.org].
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:4, Interesting)
When was the last time you bought a pot? I bought one 3 years ago for a plant (that is now nearly dead). I suspect that that pot was made in a factory as well.
You don't hear people crying about the dying pottery business. Business models change. Society evolves. There will always be a need for news. Maybe news will be reported by those that were there. Maybe news will be paid for by TV networks using revenue from advertisements. Maybe even news services could be covered by your property tax. The current news model is evolving, newspapers appear like they are on thier way out. Maybe the town crier is posed for a comeback.
Re:Another smart move from the movers and shakers. (Score:4, Insightful)
> claims that a business model which has been evolving for nearly two decades is 'malfunctioning'
>
> A lot of papers that have been around for a long time are either going bankrupt or close to it
> (losing money fast). That leads me to believe there is some kind of malfunction somewhere.
>
> I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying the newspaper business is doing just fine?
A lot of local newspapers have been acquired in the process of megacorp
media consolidation and in the process these papers have become just
another arm of the megacorp. The bean counters take over and run things
and these papers no longer become socially valuable sources of journalism.
What "street cred" they might have had before evaporates in a corporate
fireball.
Like anything else these days... there's more to the story that you're
not being told about.
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The P0rn option... (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, there are pay services for porn. Where quality and quantity is enough, a pay service is doable. Probably newspapers are near the quality and quantity needed to make it feasible. And with quantity, I mean how often you need the service. No one in the right mind will pay for a online encyclopedia, with the better one free. But for daily news, and porn, maybe.
Re:The P0rn option... (Score:4, Interesting)
I was thinking exactly this as well.
For the consumer that only wants a sixty second clip, there exists a free option.
For the consumer who wants more content, there exists a place to input the credit card number.
Newspapers could well do the same. Blurb is free, full story (and access to the discussion) requires subscription.
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Blurb is free; copying the title into a google bar and clicking on the first free result is also free.
Re:The P0rn option... (Score:4, Insightful)
They need something akin to the news stand price. Free access to headlines & summaries, or you could pay $0.99 to for 24 hour access to all articles.
If I see an article I want to read, I'm not likely to shell out $19.99 for a subscription so I can read the rest of the article. However, I might pay $0.99 to read it. If I find myself doing that regularly, I'd switch to a subscription.
Re:The P0rn option... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. And even a $.99/month option would probably net more income than ad revenue alone would...
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"Input cell phone number..."
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There, I fixed it for you, but something still doesn't look quite right ...
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Wikipedia started out as total crap.
Britannica was brilliant.
So how do you explain the shift from one to the other?
People are satisfied with the FREE version if they perceive it as a) X% as good as the non-free alternative (feel free to insert whatever percentage you think is correct) and b) more convenient.
EVEN if Britannica had been free, but required registration and log in to access, I believe people would have moved to Wikipedia because it was MORE convenient.
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Competition is not always good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Today, a citizen of Boston can use the Internet to read news from a variety of sources: "New York Times", "The Washington Post", "San Francisco Chronicle", etc. He is not forced to buy only today's editon of the "Boston Globe".
Just as any standard economics textbook states, if you destroy the monopoly by introducing competiton, monopoly profits also disappear. So, the "Boston Globe" is bleeding money.
Yet, is this competiton good? Maybe not.
Monopoly profits enable a newspaper to fund long-term investigations for stories that benefit society. For example, Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein spent months in investigating the "Watergate" scandal. That investigation cost money.
In much the same way, the monopoly profts of the old AT&T, a telephone monopoly, funded breakthrough research at Bell Laboratories. It gave us the transistor.
A research environment -- for either newspaper-investigative research or scientific research -- is ideal for allowing dedicated individuals the freedom to pursue their interests for the betterment of humankind. Competition -- with its profit-reducing mechanisms -- precludes such an environment.
What can we do? There are 3 options.
1. Go with a Public-Broadcasting Service model. Turn the newspapers into non-profit organizations that hold pledge drives to raise money. The government provides matching funds. The government, essentially acts, as the sugar mama. There is 1 potential problem. The government might try to control the news. If the investigative reports by a government-funded "Washington Post" reveal terrible things about a liberal politician, will a liberal-party-dominated government try to reduce funding to the "Washington Post"?
2. Go with an endowment model. A rich philanthropist sets up a non-profit newspaper funded by the interest of a billion-dollar endowment. The salaries of the entire staff is paid by that endowment. In this model, the newspaper is free of external meddling.
3. Go with a public-service model in which a major non-profit organization (e. g., a university or a church) maintains a newspaper division. The best example of this model is the Christian Science Monitor.
I think that choice #2 is best.
Regardless of which model is best, we must continue to have newspapers in our society. Newspapers are the bulk of the 4th branch of government. They are our eyes and ears in keeping us informed about our government. An uninformed electorate is the first step toward creating an authoritarian society.
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I think that choice #2 is best.
Well, of course that's the best. Find someone with a billion dollars to spare, and your financial constraints are lifted. That's not exactly a business model though.
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You forgot option 4), the cable TV model: instead of each newspaper trying to pay, a group of sites get together under some banner. Let's call it WumpusPay. If you have a subscription to Wumpus pay, you get past the gate at every site that is part of WumpusPay. This significantly reduces the exclusion that happens to sites that put up a pay barrier since you probably already have access, and you get a lot for you money.
Then, the members of WumpusPay distribute the revenues based on which newspapers are b
Re:Competition is not always good. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand. Why do we need newspapers in 2009? Please note: I'm not talking about "news-gathering organizations," but newspapers. Technology has moved on and newspapers have not: By the time they come out, the news in them is always old. Always old. That was one thing in the days before the Internet and before the 24-hour news cycle introduced by CNN and FoxNews and similar channels, but it's very much another thing now and not something that's required by dint of its very existence. Likewise, the costs of producing newspapers are so stratospheric, that producing them is not a smart business decision. Again, once upon a time, that didn't matter: because there were classified and print advertisements. Those are, for all intents and purposes gone.
Newspapers need to die. It's their time. This is not a bad thing. This is not a good thing. It's just the thing. There are other, better ways of distributing the news now. The idea that the only way for people to get news is to have a clump of newsprint pages thrown on your front porch (or in your driveway) every morning is ludicrous and has no relationship whatsoever to the society we live in.
News-gathering organizations need to give up newspapers and find a way to distribute their work profitably on the web. I do not know how to do this, and I realize no one does. But no one is going to figure it out as long as they cling to the idea that the production of the paper is more important than what's printed ON the paper. And that's something that much of the newspaper industry--and apparently you--are still confusing.
Frankly, I think it's best if news organizations remain for-profit. Not just because I don't want my tax dollars to have to subsidize the people who write The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times or any of the other publications that have nothing but contempt for me. But because it will force them to compete and offer better product. I find it more than a little distasteful that you advocate in favor of monopolies in your message; monopolies don't make anything better, they merely ensure that the status quo will never, ever change. But now it has to. And it will do so all the sooner--and much more effectively--if everyone is playing the game and figuring out the best way to one-up the other guy. That's how evolution in business happens.
Newspapers have been ignoring this for decades. News-gathering organizations no longer have that luxury.
More Daily Show Fodder. (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone who has been watching/reading news corp material and comparing it to on the ground reality or watching the daily show at the same time know murdoch and his henchmen are losing grip with reality and receding into delusion.
I look forward to him slowly losing his grip over news media by shutting out the majority of online readers.
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Anyone who has been watching/reading news corp material and comparing it to on the ground reality or watching the daily show at the same time know murdoch and his henchmen are losing grip with reality and receding into delusion.
You're getting your news from a comedy show and you're concerned about Murdoch's grip on reality?
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Well It's a Long Painful Death For ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, Murdoch, please be sure to notify Google that you don't want their help [slashdot.org] in gaining readership. I would also like to hear how you explain MySpace's massive success ... you only host that for free because it's user created content? You can't afford a staff with the money these sites bring in?
Good luck, you're going to need it. I would claim a move that reduces readership in any way is a bold move by any news source.
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Re:Well It's a Long Painful Death For ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well It's a Long Painful Death For Myspace (Score:5, Insightful)
I would also like to hear how you explain MySpace's massive success
What massive success? Myspace made about $75 million per quarter at peak. Their traffic peaked in Q1 2008, and is down 30% since then. Facebook passed them in April 2008 and now has 3x their traffic. Myspace never made enough of a blip in News Corp. earnings to show up as a line item.
Social networking sites have a life cycle like nightclubs, and it's short. They start, if they're lucky they become cool, they grow, the losers move in, the cool people move out, and they decline. Has-been social networking sites include AOL, Geocities, EZboard, Nerve, Friendster, Orkut, and Tribe. Social networking sites have to be valued like movies - they have to make money over their run. They're not ongoing businesses. There's a long tail of trickling revenue after the peak, as with ongoing sales of DVDs of old movies. But the big money comes early if at all.
That's problem #1 with social networking sites. Problem #2 is that the demographic is terrible from an advertiser perspective. Remember, half of all clicks come from 20% of users, and that 20% buys almost nothing. That 20% of users is Myspace's demographic.
Myspace revenue comes mostly from their Google ads. Think about that for a moment. Myspace is a big site run by a bigger publisher with sizable ad-selling operations. Yet they're running Google ads, from which Google makes most of the money. If Murdoch could make online pay, they'd be selling their own ad space. The advertisers on Myspace are mostly either bottom-feeders (links to pages with more ads and similar junk) or small advertisers who haven't figured out how to opt out of having their ad appear there.
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How is MySpace a massive success? It doesn't make any fricking MONEY.
It's not about readership. A zillion readers who don't pay is still useless. Ad revenue, especially internet ad revenue, just doesn't cut it.
What you should be worried about as a consumer of free media is what happens when the New York Times, LA Time, Washington Post, and all the other top-tier papers follow suit? They are dying to do so, I assure you.
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Do you understand that it's a long, painful death for all newspapers right now? And that includes all those newspapers whose web sites are free to the public (the New York Times almost closed the Boston Globe last week!).
Murdoch - who has built a multi-billion empire from a start in newspapers - may actually understand the newspaper business better than you do. My guess is that he is counting on most newspapers to go out of business. The advertising model is simply not profitable enough to support most news
I'll pay... (Score:3, Insightful)
If the content is interesting. I guess there's something "flawed" in Bob's business model as well.
Flawed comparison? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all flawed (Score:2)
As Clay Shirky argued [shirky.com], the newspaper itself is somewhat misplaced in an era where it is nearly free to copy and distribute information. What's the point of arguing over whether your pig ought to be pink or brown - it still won't fly.
Well... (Score:2)
As we all know the Wall Street Journal has been succesful in charging for content, heck even I have a subscription there.
The real trick there would be if they can pull together unique and novel content, and not just another AP feed in order to get a good online newspapaer. If WSJ can do it, there is plenty of reason to believe others can too.
Frankly I see a lot of newspapers doing this in the future. My hometown paper, the Loveland Reporter Herald is a good candidate for this. They do fairly decent local
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As we all know the Wall Street Journal has been succesful in charging for content
But people (at least ostensibly) use the WSJ to make money. So it can be considered a sort of investment. There is no way I'm going to pay any amount of money to let Rupert Murdoch and his cronies tell me what to think, and I think a lot of people feel the same. It's just not important enough to me.
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I agree - local papers are the ones most likely to benefit from this approach. Most peoples' hometown news just doesn't merit coverage by the BBC or Washington Post or whatever. The smallest towns might not make quite enough for this - I figure you'd need an electronic subscriber base around 10,000 at $50/year to make it really viable. As more people go online, that's a target easier to reach for more small towns.
Best of luck with that. (Score:2, Insightful)
Its going to be said hundreds of times in this thread, but I'll say it anyway.
Nobody will pay for content that used to be free.
I'll miss WSJ.com but I'll get over it.
Re:Best of luck with that. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll miss WSJ.com but I'll get over it.
Except that WSJ is the model he's basing this on. They offer some content for free, but many of us pay for full content. This is in direct contrast to what Murdoch originally planned [informationweek.com] which was to make wsj.com fully ad supported. Murdoch has pulled a full 180 and I think he's made the right decision.
Do it Rupert. Now. (Score:2, Insightful)
Screw them (Score:5, Informative)
WSJ gives free access to premium content if you are being redirected from google, facebook, digg etc. Here is a dirty little secret. The entire content on WSJ is available to you for free, if you can trick WSJ into believing that you have been directed to their webpage via digg.com!
Step1) Use firefox
Step2) Install refspoof http://refspoof.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]
Step3) Install greasemonkey https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 [mozilla.org]
Step4) Install this script in greasemonkey http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/42134 [userscripts.org]
Step5) Profit!!
Re:Screw them (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't want to install that stuff, and you come upon WSJ articles infrequently then there is another trick:
1. Click on the regular "for-pay" link.
2. When you get to the irritating half-article thing, just cut the link from the toolbar.
3. Paste it into a google search.
4. Click on the first link that comes up and read the whole article.
The WSJ is unique and non-substitutable. (Score:4, Insightful)
The WSJ's content is as "newspaper of record" for financial items. Which means its unique.
Additionally, how many of those "online" subscribers are dead-tree subscribers?
For most other news, news outlets are substitutable. If you are a substitutable item, but you charge and your competition doesn't, you're out of luck.
I second this (Score:4, Insightful)
WSJ is an outstanding newspaper. Its news articles are unique and important and interesting. New York Post, not so much.
But I would also bet that a lot of success the WSJ has had online has to do with a lot of business expense accounts paying for it.
Hows that working as long as there is free ones (Score:2)
As long as there is one free quality source for news, most people won't sign up.
Or, to turn that statement around, the quality of the reporting would have to be a class or two above the free source for me to be willing to pay for it. Which may be why it worked for the Wall Street Journal.
But then again, quality reporting is what News Corp is all about.
Go right ahead (Score:2, Informative)
Please, oh please do so, Mr Murdoch. Because I really want as much of your business as possible to fail.
Choice is key (Score:4, Interesting)
Charging CAN work for the right content (Score:5, Insightful)
People are willing to pay for content in certain areas, particularly finance sources such as the WSJ or Economist, for three reasons... (1) such sources are based on a lot of exclusive research, and so much of their information can't easily be found elsewhere. (2) the nature of finance makes it worthwhile... if you're trading thousands to millions of dollars in securities or bonds, dropping $2 a week on useful information is awfully cost-effective. (3) the target market is pretty affluent and highbrow and thus less likely to blink over this sort of thing (the fact that you're not giving it away for free actually makes it look more prestigious and attractive).
However, these considerations fall apart when you turn to non-niche mainstream news. Looking at the "free" content aggregated by Google News... it's about 50% celebrity gossip, and 50% partisan political bickering with no insightful analysis behind anything. Thanks but no thanks... I'm not paying for any of that, and I doubt many others would either.
THAT is the main problem with newspapers' business models in the current climate. They are trying to compete with online sources by racing to the bottom, and dumbing down their content in hopes of reaching a wider audience. However, their main competitive advantage is in the highbrow market... which is increasingly alienated by this dumbing-down. Produce exclusive highbrow content that can't easily be found elsewhere, and you'll absolutely be in a position to charge. Write endlessly about Anna Nicole's "baby-daddy" and Britney Spears' breakdowns, and you shouldn't expect any revenue beyond advertising because you can find that trash anywhere.
Do you provide anything unique? (Score:5, Insightful)
If so people will pay for it. If you are just regurgitating AP and/or Reuters people will not. The Wall Street Journal and The Economist provide something unique, and have been successful with subscriptions (the fact that they cater to moneyed-folk helps too). To a lesser extent the New York Post and Christian Science Monitor provide unique information and may have luck transitioning to a subscription model.
As for the rest of the newpapers that News Corporation owns, yeah I don't think so. Some of the ones that I'm not familiar with may have sufficient unique content, but most of them don't look like it. Good luck making The Sun subscription only. The online portion of that magazine thrives on ignorant (or amused) blog linking, and would loose nearly all of it's traffic if it went subscription only.
Market for your product. (Score:2)
With articles like Dont tax bigger boobs during crunch [thesun.co.uk] The sun is Murdoch's only hope to achieve a business model similar to that of the Wall Street Journal.
What do they have to lose? (Score:3, Insightful)
Give me a PDF, iphone app, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm totally fine paying for an electronic paper. For many sitting down at the breakfast table with your paper, reading it on the train, or having it next to the toilet is great. I'm going to miss some of the things the physical paper can bring.
I like to linking to stories and all, but sometimes I want the real deal and even with 3G I'd still like a properly formated thing without stupid flash ads off to the side. A decent app for my cell phone or something like the kindle would be great.
I'd be happy to pay 5 bucks a month for the a paper in some electronic form. And yes it'll be pirated to all hell, but even though a lot on here won't believe me...some people actually like to pay for things...the whole keeping the system moving forward....some of us did grow up after all.
News Corp Will Attempt to Charge For Websites (Score:2)
This is much more akin to the average car, which people are not buying in drov
Just to counter all the "goodluckwiththat" ACs: (Score:3)
It is not a stupid idea, because it is the only one that makes sense at all. You've made something that costs you money. You want to live from it. You you gotta sell it. Simple as that.
The real point is, that the price and the money that it's worth to the clients have to match, for it to work.
So if they go the way of the **AA, it will certainly fail. And this is what you "goodluckwiththat" people imply.
But if they really put a nice price tag on it. (Like 1 cent per article read. or $1 a month for a subscription.), And then use that additional money to make their business work better, and then ask a bit more for it (2-5 cent for special articles. Maybe $1.5 a month.). Then they've got a working business model.
The only thing they need to start, is news that you can't get anywhere else. Special insight. Exclusive interviews. Reporters traveling to places where no-one else goes, finding stories that no-one else has. And no bullshit about Britney or Obama ordering a burger, etc. Then you got something that is worth my money.
Another bonehead move (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, the great ignorant unwashed masses the extreme right rely on for political support will not pay for something they can get for free elsewhere.
Although this is a boneheaded move, it will be beneficial because it will shink Murdoch's audience to the point of political irrelevance, which will allow a resurgence of socialism.
There's a reason WSJ makes money online (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the sad thing is (Score:5, Insightful)
Um.... sure they will. Hate t break this to you, but regardless of party affiliation, folks are like you and me.... cheap. If one source of news is free and another isn't, folks will flock to the free.
Re:the sad thing is (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:the sad thing is (Score:5, Insightful)
The missed concept here, on Murdoch's part, is that people don't even think they 'pay' for the news now in electronic media formats.
Sure we sometimes pay for channels on TV, but pretty much every channel that offers news is offered for free over the airwaves. How is it funded? ADVERTISEMENTS/COMMERCIALS. You hear about OJ, then you see a commercial from Gerber... Etc...
This is actually how most news websites seem to operate right now, which does not appear to be failing.
I'm not sure what premium content Mr. Murdoch thinks he can offer for a fee, but as posted earlier, people will simply choose the source that doesn't charge. Maybe we will have to 'pay' by trying to ignore penis enlargement banners and the new Ford car model... But I think we're all pretty well adapted to doing that anyway.
Fuckem. Let the proof be in the pudding. I hope he takes Faux news along with him to the fail party.
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[...] people will simply choose the source that doesn't charge.
So one interesting way to look at this is how many news organizations can support themselves from an advertising model?
Advertising requires viewers--you charge for people seeing the ad. If you have 100 websites with the news, you may not have enough viewers to make advertising work. If there are only 10 websites, those 10 may make enough money from advertising for it to be worthwhile.
So you'll always have "free news" just because, eventually, the market will decide which news sources are "the best" and al
Re:the sad thing is (Score:5, Funny)
Because it has seen your last few posts and is trying to save you the embarrassment :)
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I hear you. Sure, I know the news 'shows' that are on Fox are highly biased, but, I like to watch them. I like to watch CNN, and yes, I know they have a spin too.
Frankly in this day in age, I think one almost has to watch most all of these news channels, and then assemble what y
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Every major news organization I know of has deliberately spiked or even made up stories at some time in the past. That goes for all of them, including sacred cows such as the The Washington Post, CBS, NBC, and so on and so forth.
Many newspapers have spiked stories because it didn't live up to their political world view. The act of omission is as bad as the act of lying --which by the way, is nothing new to that bastion of Journalism, The New York Times.
If you think Fox is the only organization to have had d
Re:the sad thing is (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is why this is a great move. Not for Murdoch or News Corps employees of course, but for all of the free news web sites out there. News Corp is removing its self from the gene pool and will drive traffic to the sites that 'get it'. And with increased traffic comes ad revenue, commenters ^H unpaid content providers, and with more revenue and more content they can offer a better product.
Owning a newspaper has always been about the vanity of owning a newspaper, they've never made money.
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Indeed.
Now if only Fox News would become a "pay-by-the-minute" service...
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I hope not. FOX is the only channel that provides both the "big government is the only solution" and the "government is the problem" viewpoints. In contrast the other channels like CNN or NBC sound like they are personal spokespersons for Speaker Pelosi.
Re:the sad thing is (Score:4, Informative)
The only channel that provides both the "big government is the only solution" and the "government is the problem" viewpoints.
Ah yes, "big government is the only solution" as long as republicans controlled Congress and the White House, then "government is the problem" the moment Obama took office.
Yes, the channel that:
1. Cut its' teeth perfecting the propagandist ad hominem attack on Bill Clinton.
2. Led the media charge in subverting the 2000 presidential election.
3. Shifted gears by endlessly repeating that criticizing the president is unpatriotic (USA - love it or leave it).
4. Distorted public perception of Kerry in 2004 by attempting to ridicule him at every opportunity, via ad hominem attacks, of course.
5. Attacks the current president at every opportunity, organizes nonsensical, astroturf tea bag protests and openly talks of insurrection and state secession, because now, by their own amnesiac and twisted logic, it's patriotic to be unpatriotic, I guess.
Now, if someone like Olbermann or Maddow had their show on Faux (and in prime time, as opposed to buried in the 3am slot), I would concede your point, but having a mousy, token pseudo-progressive like Alan Colmes, who willingly and meekly took nightly prime-time punishment at the hands of Hannity, Coulter, Malkin, Ingraham, etc, is not a sincere execution of representing all viewpoints.
In fact, it only makes the incredible shrinking Faux audience reinforce their misguided belief on at least two fronts: ...who consider illogical, hysterical talking points such as "Is Kerry a flip flopper?", "Some people say that the latest Bin Laden tape is an endorsement to Kerry", as legitimate and debatable.
1. Them lib'ruls are creepy looking academia types in tweed...
2.
And then, they hire Karl Rove, of all people, the prince of fucking darkness itself, as one of their payroll spinmeisters.
Make no mistake about it, Faux was not designed to be a money making operation in and of itself, but to push an extreme right wing agenda, to create a climate where even centrists (such as Clinton, Kerry and Obama) are tagged with that tired old canard, pinko communists.
Well, no mass media corporation has lost more money in the current socio-economic climate as News Corp. I must admit, to see it collapse along with Clear Channel, who recently laid off 3000 employees while simultaneously extending Limbaugh's contract for over 200 million dollars, will create the most satisfying sense of schadenfreude, along with returning some sanity to public discourse in the airwaves.
Other channels like CNN or NBC sound like they are personal spokespersons for Speaker Pelosi.
Sad but true. I'll chip in state that you forgot the do-nothing, good-for-nothing gentleman from Nevada, Harry Reid. Yes, the system is broken and needs a spectacular shock, such as a grass roots, legitimate third party to fearlessly challenge the corporate lobbyist paradigm in Washington. In the meantime, however, in this seriously flawed world, I'll take Pelosi over Tom Delay as Speaker Of The House any day of the week.
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Tell that to Hearst.
Re:the sad thing is (Score:4, Insightful)
The value in owning a newspaper is not the profit of distributing the rag, but in the power of your particular spin.
The kind of spin mega-corps like to fund as it subtly promotes their brands and lends them massive lobbying clout.
Re:the sad thing is (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is why this is a great move. Not for Murdoch or News Corps employees of course, but for all of the free news web sites out there. News Corp is removing its self from the gene pool and will drive traffic to the sites that 'get it'. And with increased traffic comes ad revenue, commenters ^H unpaid content providers, and with more revenue and more content they can offer a better product.
And what are you going to do when we're all charging for access? That time is coming and a lot sooner than you'll like. Online advertising revenues aren't going to carry the water by themselves. At some point, you're going to either pay up or do without.
Owning a newspaper has always been about the vanity of owning a newspaper, they've never made money.
Absolutely false. Newspapers' profit margins have traditionally run upwards of 15 percent (by comparison, ExxonMobil (XOM) [yahoo.com] has a profit margin of just under 10 percent). The reason newspaper publishers are whining now is because they're no longer making money at rates that make the Mafia envious and are desperate to preserve a profit margin that's possible in no other industry. Until a few years ago, print advertising paid revenue like no other source, to the point that newspaper executives (who, almost without exception, are not from the reporting side of the industry [/bitter]) flat-out refused to consider spending money on trying to figure out how to come up with some sort of business model for online content delivery. Newspapers are still profitable; the bean-counters' problem is that newspapers aren't as profitable as they used to be and the bean-counters haven't come to terms with that fact yet.
I can't begin to count how many meetings I had to endure where business-types implored us reporter types to figure out how to attract younger readers to the traditional printed newspaper. They really didn't want to hear me tell them that younger readers have grown up with the Internet, greatly preferred online news delivery and really didn't care about a product that was at least six hours old by the time they got it. I rather suspect --- but can't prove --- that my bluntness on that topic made me part of the class of laid-off-and-bought-out journalists back in 2005, when it was still a bit of a rarity compared to now [graphicdesignr.net].
Re:the sad thing is (Score:4, Interesting)
And what are you going to do when we're all charging for access?
I'll probably ride my unicorn up over the rainbow into the clouds, because that will never happen.
The fact of the matter is that (porn excepted) people don't pay for online content. Period. If that means we only get "amateur" news reporting, then that's what it will mean.
Show me one successful online news source that pays for a large investigative staff off of walled-off subscription content. One.
I know my local paper [tulsaworld.com] tried allowing online access only to subscribers (print subscription worked). It failed. There are just too many other places to get free news (even if its inferior). They eventually had to make everything free to try to generate some kind of revenue off of it. Salon [salon.com] tried the same thing when their VC money initially ran out. They hemoraged readership. Within a few weeks they felt the need to provide public access again with annoyance ads that you could buy away. Eventually those were gone too.
Perhaps Mr. Murdoch thinks he has some grand business theory that nobody on the web has ever thought of before to make pay content work. But unless porn is involved, he's wrong.
I don't have a crystal ball, but my guess for where we are all headed is a web full of independent investivate reporters with their own websites. Here's a local example [gossip-boy.com]
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At the moment, I get my mainstream media news from timesonline, telegraph, guardian and news.bbc.co.uk. BBC is the most popular site in the country, and I believe the Telegraph is the second most popular.
I expect most timesonline readers are people who like me also read other newspaper sites. If Murdoch starts charging for it, they will just continue to read the other sites and not bother reading the Times.
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The airlines do this all the time, where one carrier raises prices, then maybe one or two follow to see if it can stick.
Murdoch won't be permitted to make it stick. The actual value of his journalistic endeavors is pretty poor-- especially in the post financial crisis meltdown. Add in the dubious qualities of Fox Network, and the only possibility he has is to take other Fox media and put it onto Hulu and hope.
Murdoch lives in fantasyland, along with a lot of other old media publishers.
Re:the sad thing is (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the sad thing is (Score:4, Insightful)
will go where the information is free and there will always be an unbiased source of free news.
In case you weren't aware, journalists are paid with proceeds from newspaper and advertising sales. Accurate, unbiased reporting isn't going to come from folks who blog in their spare time. It comes from professionals.
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I agree that we can't rely on bloggers to report the news. Bloggers have a role in the big picture though. And simply paying the journalists won't keep them ethical. We need a business model that thrives on the net, and lets journalists write the news that matters, not just the news that sells.
Re:the sad thing is (Score:4, Insightful)
Accurate, unbiased reporting isn't going to come from folks who blog in their spare time. It comes from professionals.
This just shows how out of it a lot of people are.
The only reason anybody ever cared about "unbiased reporting" was because for a breif period in the 20th Century we had very few alternative outlets to go to if we personally found the reporting unreasonable.
However, we have oodles of outlet choices today, so now nobody gives a crap. In fact, if the story is about something like a hate group marching in my city, or a looming catastrophe that every scientific specialist agrees is coming, supposedly "unbiased reporting" is not only unwelcome, it is morally reprehensible. The last thing in the world we need in this day and age is a bunch of "professionals" controlling our access to information, and hiding their biases from us while pretending they don't have any at all.
The funny thing is... (Score:3, Insightful)
the signature is actually refuting the "right-wing" idea of atheism as a religion. Retchdog was so prepared to be offended that he didn't even bother to parse the sentence beyond the spelling error. Congratulations retchdog, you managed to combine a mis-interpretation, an ad hominem and a style over substance fallacy into one tidy flamebait!
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