Google Will Star In New Dow Jones News Model 95
An anonymous reader writes "Dow Jones is getting set to launch a new aggregator, akin to Google News, which will charge Web users for access to high-quality journalism. 'The Journal is one of the many newspapers you might buy in one place and with one payment [...] Watch for it,' said Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton. However, rather than posing a threat to Google News, Andrew Keen, author and entrepreneur, says the aggregator will use Google as a critical partner. The only people who should be worried about this new model, says Keen, 'are all those lucky consumers who, over the last 15 years, have been getting their news for free.'"
To be fair to the WSJ (Score:4, Interesting)
They not only started charging for their content, but stuck with it long after other companies had moved to horifically low paying internet ads. The result is that people who subscribe to the WSJ online expect to pay for content, whereas people who use other news sites expect to get their news for free.
Re:Sounds friendly... (Score:5, Interesting)
I find this extremely ironic because today a columnist from _Reuters_ broke the big news story about the Goldman Sachs arrest. And Reuters has a very informative web site. While NY and Chicago papers (who should have broken the story because it happened in their cities) were snoozing.
Controlling the aggregator won't making papers profitable. Delivering a service people _want to pay for_ (like Flickr, or WSJ, or the Economist) will make them profitable. And so far, local papers (even in bigger cities like Boston) are just not doing that.
Re:Really... (Score:4, Interesting)
Your knee-jerk cynicism changes nothing. As bad as the press is, a world without them would be even worse. Instead of celebrity-driven news like CNN, you'd have Stan the Basement Blogger picking apart a press release from Apple ad nauseum. And there is no guarantee of bloggers' neutrality, either. Good journalism costs money-yet doing good journalism doesn't often make money, and often can hinder an organization's ability to make money. The US needs a BBC.