Murdoch Says, "We'll Charge For All Our Sites" 881
Oracle Goddess writes "In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide, Rupert Murdoch announced that his media giant News Corporation Ltd intends to charge for all its news websites in a bid to lift revenues, as the transition towards online media permanently changes the advertising landscape. 'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made content free. Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites,' Murdoch said."
suicidal. (Score:5, Insightful)
And... (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't work. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Rupert's eying the success of the Wall Street Journal as an online subscription site a little too much. What works for the WSJ won't work for other papers, IMO.
Everyone I know in the UK (Score:2, Insightful)
reads BBC news [bbc.co.uk] anyway, so it won't do much here.
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:suicidal. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one way to ensure nobody reads his stuff.
Yes, I was just thinking what wonderfully good news this is!
Re:One can only hope... (Score:1, Insightful)
but you can't get the "real" news from anywhere else. *snicker*
I'm going to predict that this will work. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to predict that this will work.
Who cares about how many hits you have, when the real key is profitability. The WSJ is pretty good online and its worth the subscription.
Obviously Fox News's site is a different animal but if you just had a Fox media site with reporting that was real, it could work.
But for that to happen, you have to give people content they are willing to pay for, and that means that Murdoch has to invest in journalism if he wants people to pay for it.
Technologically, what the media needs is a micro-payments system setup so that you can have a single billing identity that lets you get all the stories... it would cover Fox, CBS, etc, and a bunch of news sites.
Re:This is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Because a sheep-like mentality is limited to the right wing only?
The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep or assume that they're not intelligent.
Re:This is a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Silly Americans with their "right wing" vs "left wing" so-called political opinions...
Nothing in real life is black or white, it's always shades of grey.
WAKE UP.
Re:This is a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
No Spin Zone... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
So you clean up by doubling the deficit within 6 months? That'll make things MUCH better. Good show. Sheep.
Re:What a nice gift to progressives (Score:2, Insightful)
Please let this be true! (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's just be quiet and encouraging everyone. This could be the best thing since sliced bread. Imagine, disinformation suddenly declines 30% on its own accord. Hold off on the jeering until it is a done deal because you might tip them off!
Re:This is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep or assume that they're not intelligent.
No... here let me help you...
The absolute worst thing anybody can do is dehumanize their opposition by calling them sheep and then put them all in ovens.
Re:Hello alternative media (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope we can come up with better alternatives than that. While what gets reported by the MSM might be selective, at least most of the facts aren't in dispute. I have no desire to wade through the "news" trying to figure out who has a scoop and who simply forgot to take their meds. Alex Jones??? I think I'm gonna puke.
Re:Thank you Jesus (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a nice gift to progressives (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell? Care to explain that little logical implication to me?
This doesn't affect their most powerful medium: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with those who say that they are biased and skew their news toward that bias - they hardly hide it. However, we can't deny an overall bias from corporate news sources. I think the majority of journalists prefer to at least attempt an unbiased reporting of the news, but simple business interests often dictate not only how the news is presented, but what news is presented in the first place. And then there's independent media (which at least usually has the decency to make no bones about their bias). I myself listen to Democracy Now and can be fairly assured that I can trust the honesty of Amy Goodman, but I also know that I need to verify things at least to see if I agree with her take on it, with which I don't always agree.
Like his MySpace acquisition? (Score:5, Insightful)
Murdoch bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Not such a hot property these days [crainsnewyork.com]. I wouldn't put any money into Murdoch's internet instincts.
Re:One more reason not to watch O'Reilly. (Score:2, Insightful)
As if I needed one . . .
... as if you ever did.
Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo? (Score:2, Insightful)
All of you idiot political fanbois are lemmings through and through.
To paraphrase the dead guy's lyrics: It don't matter if you're left or right..
Murdoch - not your average supervillain (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that, despite (or rather, because of) Murdoch's strangehold on your media, most people really don't understand the megabadness of Murdoch.
I know, I know, soooo 20th Century... so I'll boil it down for you geeks: You know the Jedi Emperor? Murdoch doesn't just look like that guy - in the cast of malignities afflicting the planet, he *is* that guy.
Google for more. You'll be surprised what you didn't know about old Rupe.
Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Murdoch - not your average supervillain (Score:5, Insightful)
Regretably, Rupert made his start in the news business here in good old Adelaide SA, where he had his first newspaper an afternoon tabloid, called "The News" we also had a excellent morning broadshhet paper called The Advertiser which was a family owned business that stayed independant for many years.
Up until quite recently the News corp AGM was held here.
In the end Murdoch got hold of The Advertiser and turned it into exactly the same crap tabloid as The News, which was then closed. When the original editor retired, he appointed of course a right wing loony.
One of my very favourite Murdoch comments was after an interview with the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, who questioned him very well, asking questions he really did not want to answer.
After the end of the interview his mic was left on and he was clearly heard to say "Fucking ABC bastards", much to the listeners amusement.
Re:What a nice gift to progressives (Score:2, Insightful)
Dan Rather: "Fake but accurate." Thank you, I'll be here all night.
You're just another shill who has a bent, nothing more and nothing less. Take off the rose colored glasses, and stop pretending that only one part of the media manipulates.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: "We have too much traffic on our websites so plans are in place to drop that volume of visitors dramatically."
Re:It won't work. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's really quite sad that Slashdot viewers think they understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch. All that crazy hubris could be used someplace more effective.
Anyway one of the man's first moves after buying Barron's and the Wall Street Journal was to make the content freely available on the web. It would seem that they tried it, and it didn't work.
Re:People have been spoiled... (Score:3, Insightful)
I already pay. I pay my ISP. I pay for my servers. I hate spam as much as the next person, but I also don't want yet another hand in my pocket, running yet another "protection racket." Want to eliminate spam? Have a system of fines for people stupid enough to buy shit off them - and a 3-month jail term for a 3rd offense. Spam works because people are stupid, lazy, and greedy.
There are plenty of things in this world that are free - that's why they're priceless. It's not all about money, and it's not all about your (or anyone else's) "right" to make money. You have the right to fail in business, same as everyone else. Not everyone puts up a website to make money from ad dollars - there are legit sites that offer customer support, online ordering, etc. So take your adwords accounts and "seo optimization" and go fuck yourself, if you can't provide a legit service.
Cooperation to solve prisoner's dilemma? (Score:5, Insightful)
Online news has been stuck in a prisoner's dilemma situation (from their POV). If everyone charged for news, then they'd be OK. When only some people charge for news, those that charge lose their audience. That drives the system to the equilibrium of noone charging for news. From the consumer's POV this is a good thing.
Because Murdoch owns so much of the news, he might be able to break out of the current poor (for newspaper publishers) equilibrium. Of course, if he can do so then he's pretty much demonstrated that he has enough of a monopoly that market power isn't working. There would be evidence for an anti-trust case against him.
The other problem with all this is that it assumes that the problem newspapers are having with revenue is caused by the cannibalisation of the print editions by the online editions. I understand, although I cannot provide evidence, that the real problem is that the classified market has gone away. The newspapers lunch got eaten by eBay and Craigslist, not cannibalised by their own online offerings. And if this is true, then raising prices for consumers might increase revenue, but it wont return it to where it was.
corporate games (Score:1, Insightful)
You folks are silly. Cheap access for news aggregation services that Murdoch likes, expensive access for those he doesn't. Differing rates for different news "ages" Companies friendly to Murdoch's empire and beliefs will suddenly have more available content. Those not friendly will lose some. Another front on the info war of media giants.
Funny though, if anyone can access the content anywhere publicly and this type of behavior increases, we'll see an increase in web scraping local aggregators.
Or imagine a freenet style network where your web scraper pulls stories from the content you subscribe to and broadcast it to others who do likewise with their web scrapers.
Re:It won't work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It won't work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, you are partially right. Many of the WSJ articles are freeley availible for a limited amount of time. It's more of a hybrid pay site with more free access then when it was a complete pay site. You can go there right now [wsj.com] and browse most all current stories. What the subscription does is give detailed access and historical content and access to some storied which they decided wasn't free. You also get access to the WSJ europe and Asia additions in the same respect.
There is a lot of free content on the WSJ which is why all these other people claiming that he will go under are clueless about the situation. It looks like there are enough articles availible freely that people will become interested in visiting and pay to get more.
I also think this will have some sort of cross site subscription model (like with the WSJ having access to the Europe and Asia editions also). Perhaps a yearly subscription would give you access to all regional news site holdings or something.
Re:This is a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
As I always say, "There's no reason both sides can't be completely wrong."
Re:No Spin Zone... (Score:1, Insightful)
Remember, it's only flamebait if it goes against the general Slashbot sheep ideals.
Glasses indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Dan Rather: "Fake but accurate."
A pithy summary for a document that no one for a moment disputed was false based on its contents.
You're just another shill who has a bent, nothing more and nothing less. Take off the rose colored glasses, and stop pretending that only one part of the media manipulates.
The mainstream broadcast media has their problems, and certainly biases, but nobody else in broadcast media working on an out-and-out agenda at the scale that Fox works.
Re:People have been spoiled... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you can get that from a typical hosting company, who oversells their capacity and bet that nobody uses even a fraction of it and who has one administrator for a whole low rent data center... But real servers (dedicated servers, not virtuals crammed 100 to a box), full capacity pipes, and dedicated administrators with a triple nine data center cost considerably more.
On top of which, you conveniently forgot the cost of providing content - which isn't cheap.
Re:This is a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Anything that reduces the number of sheep reading right wing echo chambers can only help America.
Anything that reduces the number of sheep reading extremist echo chambers can only help America. As with pretty much any argument or debate, all sides have their fair share of very loud, extremist whackjobs who, despite being a very small portion of the population, manage to make the calm, rational people on all sides look bad.
I'm not sure I get the joke (Score:3, Insightful)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/americas/03iht-journalists.1.19890938.html [nytimes.com]
Perhaps you could explain the point here.
Is there evidence that the journalists referenced in the article in any way distorted facts during the election?
If not, and they were simply pro-Obama, is their evidence or even a good argument that their support was based in zombie-like fervor rather than studied consideration?
Similarly, is there evidence that their decision to enter public service after the election wasn't
Finally, what evidence exists that these journalists represent a critical mass of journalists as a whole?
Re:Well, (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite frankly, I'm amazed that it took this long for a high score comment to say something without the words "suicide", "foot", and "bullet".
I hope that people remember that people using your services is not a guarantee of success, right?
Re:suicidal. (Score:5, Insightful)
People dont pay for 'Facts' or 'news' per se - but they do pay for opinions.
...whoa, there. Facts are costly: they have to be researched and referenced to have any credibility; opinion is based on fact (or should be). Any blowhard can have an opinion on any fact, but who's going to foot the bill for finding fact in the first place?
This is one of the reasons why modern media is so biased and uninformative - it's easier and cheaper for them to parrot the 'facts' spoon-fed to them by the government/corporate organisations, or 'facts' (usually originating from the same spoon-feeders, but with an added note of hysteria) gleaned from the web. Real reporting = $ = less profit ( = angry 'sponsors').
But everybody: Shhhhhhhh! Let Murdoch dig his own grave.
1-dimensional America misses point. (Score:4, Insightful)
You failed to get my point that US politics is so polarised that one side cannot even contemplate the views of the other. In British parliament systems an act known as "crossing the floor" used to be commonplace. Crossing the floor was to change allegiance to the other party by literally crossing across the parliament chambers to the other parties bench.
./.
Churchill did this twice in his career, "to rat and then to re-rat" in his words. I cant see Hillary Clinton or Mike Huckabee switching sides once, let alone twice. US Politicians don't seem capable of changing their perceptions, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence and this is often reflected in many "voters" here on
In Australia we have two main political parties, Liberal and Labour. Neither of these parties can be described as "left" or "right" as both have a small segment from both the extreme left and extreme right thus the parties as a whole exists across the entire left/right spectrum. This results in one party making right decisions on one topic (business) and left decisions on a different topic (education).
Also Politics it two dimensional, Socialist (left), Capitalist (right) Authoritarian (up) and Liberal (down). All political entities have an X and a Y coordinate on the political compass [politicalcompass.org].
Re:What a nice gift to progressives (Score:2, Insightful)
To claim that ANYTHING is unbiased is ridiculous. The only thing to do is read from sources that state their bias up-front.
Bias is not always bad. Pretending it's not there (Fox, CNN) is.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:0, Insightful)
Your post was offtopic and inflammatory. Would you have preferred a flamebait mod? Quit bitching, you're not the only asshole with an agenda on this site and you lost the right to complain as soon as you asserted your opinion as fact.
No single business plan. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is utterly mind boggling about this announcement is that it is being applied uniformly across a huge spectrum of publications with wildly different readerships and usage patterns. I understand the desire and need to find the ways to monetize news investigation, reporting, analysis and gossip, and concede that they way things are being done now may not be the best. But does Murdoch really believe that what works for Wall Street Journal the will work for The Sun?
Seriously. The "blogosphere" may not create much usefull content in and of itself but it is an increadable tool for redirecting visitors to content and for providing discussion on that content. If you setup a paywall, you block yourself out of that market and the ad revenue it generates. For some publications it probably won't matter. For those that thrive on discussion and gossip it will matter dearly. If Murdoch can't understand the difference then he needs to retire.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works.
That's not the way the world works *currently*. But, prior to the last few years information *was* free; people only had to pay for distribution of that information (and, hence, the invention of the "newspaper"). Now, we have an insanely cheap technology for distribution and the old guard are trying to change the model to pay-for-information without anyone noticing.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works. Toss em out -you wont need masses of readers anymore to support ad revenue- and let us pay you a fair price for the service you tender. Why would someone even think that they would make their newspapers available for free? Is this some kind of base assumption we run on that everything on the internet should be free and we just flush the bills down the toilet? What's happening is they incur cost producing Content and then they give it away for free. What kind of crazy business model is that, you make NO PROFIT. Strip off all this advertising crap. Charge for premium content. Turn the web into a real, competitive marketplace. We can dig deeper so only for actual content and services by the way
So what you're saying is that we should put you in the category of people that just don't get it?
I can't speak for anyone but myself but:
I don't expect newspapers to be available for free on the internet--at least I don't expect anything that resembles the sunday print edition of the NYT to be there for free. The problem is that there is no effective way to charge for them the way there is for physical newspapers. Sure you can do authenticated logins and accounts--but all you've done is made electronic versions of the old way of doing it, and nothing has changed then. In fact, it is a step backwards for the flow of information if you could actually make that work--no more borrowing the paper from the guy in the next cubicle. So what you seem to be advocating is a move to a world with even less freedom of information than we had two decades ago.
The internet is designed to move information from place to place as cheaply as possible. Trying to artificially inflate the price won't work. We can't make computers that aren't good at copying information (they wouldn't be computers then).
I don't know what business model they should come up with. There might not be one, period. Oh well. There wasn't one before the printing press either. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Buggy makes don't have a business model anymore, neither do the people who made player-piano rolls. Nor flint-lock manufacturers. There's a ton of Benedictian monks out of work thanks to the printing press. Just try finding someone to make a good Roman piss-pot for you these days.
What I don't understand is why you think it is a bad thing that this might happen. The de-corporatization of news media is the BEST possible thing that could happen to this country right now. We should not be looking for ways to preserve corporate control of information.
How can he not understand ad support? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can a newspaper mogul not understand about ad supported content? Most of the cost of a newspaper is ads. You really think fifty cents a copy pays for content, printing and distribution?
Similarly how can he not understand about supply and demand? His competitors are not other newspapers who try to adopt the same business model. His competitors are the free, ad-supported news services. On a level playing field, they'll eat him alive.
I can't believe he's this stupid, so he must think he has an ace up his sleeve. And the only ace I can think of in this case is government intervention.
Godwin (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, it was a nice thread while it lasted.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:2, Insightful)
Everything these days seems to be obsession with Free Free Free because there's some expection that selling advertising space is the best way to construct a stable world wide web.
I don't think the main concern is a stable web. The concern for most companies is how to generate profit. Plenty of companies have proved that providing free content with advertisements is a viable business model. I don't think many rational people are arguing it works for every facet of business on the internet though. The competition in the marketplace is main force that is driving these services to be free. If a service like Twitter started charging, another company would quickly offer the same service for free. As a consumer, I like this. I don't really care if someone cannot figure out a way to make money off of Twitter. I want the most benefit for the least cost. Getting the most benefit does not always mean free though. I choose to pay Google to provide their email client for a small business. There are plenty of free email clients, but I think GMail is worth the cost. When the services you mention start giving some sort of benefit over the competition, then they can start charging consumers.
Re:Fox News (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I dislike the content that fox news reports as news. I will stand and fight for their right to do so as given by the constitution for a very good reason. You can't have freedom of the press on one hand, and then demand they conform to what you deem to be the truth, no matter how correct you may be on what the truth is. Yes I wish that people in general were smarter and would try to verify their ramblings, and look past the talk, but life is what it is. I also wish that we had a news station more like the Daily Show in format, at least then we could have some actual rebuttal to some of the more flagrant biases. While I realize that the Daily Show is purely a comedy show, it is a constant dissapointment to me how they are generally much better at reporting accurate news than the news stations themselves.
Re:Thank you Jesus (Score:4, Insightful)
Haha yes, good comparison. If Jesus lived today Fox news probably constantly would make up stories how bad he is and this evil communist must be brought down by the CIA etc...
And after the cruzification they probably would make a special report day how the world got better once after the death of this communist hippie.
Anyway given the current state of society Jesus probably would have ended in a similar fate. Probably brought down by exactly the same type of people.
Re:It won't work. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's really quite sad that Slashdot viewers think they understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch. All that crazy hubris could be used someplace more effective.
I don't have to think I understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch to think this is a questionable move. I wouldn't be surprised if Murdoch himself thought this was a bit of a gamble. The reality is that right now Rupert Murdoch is between a rock and a hard place. He initially went with the free ad-based model because it was clear that subscription models were only working in special cases. Apparently the free approach is failing, and he's resorting to a subscription model as plan B.
Some types of media just aren't going to survive the changes the internet is bringing, and newspapers may be one of them. I don't think I know better than Rupert Murdoch. I think he knows that his industry is in trouble too. It will be interesting to see if he finds a way to convert his resources into something workable in the future.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:3, Insightful)
Killing the newspapers is going to make the average person less likely to be informed, both nationally but especially locally.
Two rhetorical questions for you.
1) Do you think it's more likely that the average American gets his or her news from newspapers, or from television?
2) What percentage of news stories do you think the average newspaper subscriber reads?
The last time a paperboy came by my apartment asking me to "subscribe" to an ad-supported paper - that is, receive the paper for free - I said "No, thank you, I can get better news online, and I don't have to find a recycling bin for it."
My neighbor (also a computer programmer) quizzed the same paperboy about the features provided by a newspaper. "Does it update automatically, all day, with new relevant facts? Does it show me only the stories I'm interested in? Does it keep track of which stories I've read and which I haven't?" And so on and so forth.
You know, if newspapers disappeared tomorrow, then a few years from now, I really don't think America would miss them very much.
Re:Murdoch is no fool (Score:3, Insightful)
Having had access to loads of free movies... I mean mus... d'oh... news for years, people are not going to pay all of a sudden. I may cost only 2 cents to print a newspaper, but people will pay the extra dollar to have it, even though it has all the drawbacks of the old media.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:1, Insightful)
LOL,
Look! someone who doesn't get it!
Hey big media mogul, Here's a FREE clue, WE DON'T NEED YOU ANYMORE.
Fuck off and take your shareholders and bonus structure with you.
We can (obviously) generate our own content, we sure as hell aren't going to BUY the same old crap from you that you are trying to shove down our necks already.
The Newspaper thing was great when you had the MONOPOLY on the collection, presentation and distribution of news.
Sadly for you that's no longer the way it is.
Besides, you all stopped doing the job you we expected you to do (and greatly valued I might add) when you became the people that echo press releases instead of being the people that call BULLSHIT when it's offered.
No, you deserve to die. Truly, something better will rise from your ashes.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works. Toss em out -you wont need masses of readers anymore to support ad revenue- and let us pay you a fair price for the service you tender. Why would someone even think that they would make their newspapers available for free? Is this some kind of base assumption we run on that everything on the internet should be free and we just flush the bills down the toilet? What's happening is they incur cost producing Content and then they give it away for free. What kind of crazy business model is that, you make NO PROFIT. Strip off all this advertising crap. Charge for premium content. Turn the web into a real, competitive marketplace. We can dig deeper so only for actual content and services by the way
You missed my point totally mate. When I buy a newspaper, I am paying for someone to chop down trees, someone to make ink, someone to run huge sheets of paper through huge machines that print on them, then fold them, then deliver them to newsagents, and each person has to make a dollar.
That's fine. Well, actually it's NOT. I stopped buying newspapers a long time ago because I found that I was only interested in one or two stories in an entire newspaper. Those one or two stories were generally covered online by the sites that I visit on a regular basis. So, I stopped buying newspapers. I am one of the people that falls into the stopped buying newspapers, turned to the internet group.
What Mr Rupert seems to be totally MISSING which is the point I am making is that should he put the SAME content on the internet that he puts into the printed version, I am STILL NOT INTERESTED in paying for it. Possibly less so.
Just because I stopped buying a newspaper and get things off the net doesn't mean I will start buying a newspaper just because it's available online.
What compounds this even more is that he is investing probably millions of dollars into a multi-billion dollar business and he seems to be missing this simple point.
Do I expect a whole newspaper of content for free online in one place with no ads? Nope.
Can I always get the two or three things I am interested in from either sites like Slashdot for free in the detail that I want? Yes.
I think a lot of newspapers and media that previously sold very large volumes better start telling shareholders that they are going to face a serious decline in readership and profits due to the availability of small snippets of information on the internet. The glory days of ALL PRINT MEDIA are GONE. Finished. They won't be reborn with a new fee on a website.
Now do you get it?
Re:People have been spoiled... (Score:5, Insightful)
Newspapers are not free, books are not free, movies are not free. All these mediums have people behind them. People like you that like to eat. To buy clothes. To ensure their kids have a great Christmas.
... and the same was true with buggywhip manufacturers, and telephone operators who manually connected every phone call, and GM. Why should I have to bail them, or you, out?
I hate this analogy, and Slashdot is absolutely the worst proponent of it.
Buggywhip manufacturers, manual telephone switch operators, monks who manually copied documents, etc., all lost their jobs because they no longer added value to society and/or their employers. No one needed buggywhips when cars supplanted horse-drawn carriages, no one needed a person to switch calls if a computer could do it faster and cheaper, and no one needed monks to manually copied documents when the printing press could do it faster and cheaper. That all makes sense.
The analogy fails for media because people still want media, and still want media to be created by media creators (writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc.). In other words, the media creators still add value to society and/or their employer. The media's value is in its creation, not in its distribution.
And as everyone loves to point out, distribution costs can go to $0 or close to it...but creation costs do not. You still have to pay writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc., to create the media. If you choose not to pay your media creators, then you end up with amateurs recording home movies of their cats doing stupid things and uploading them to YouTube. Which has yet to make a profit for anyone.
So, no, news and reporters are not on par with monks who copied documents thousands of years ago. They are reporting news, and there is still value in, and demand for, that.
Re:Since Fox News is no News - No Problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Fox News is to News what Professional Wrestling is to Sports so good luck with that Rupert. Hopefully the next owner of foxnews will have a nice site dealing with news about Foxes.
I almost hate to point this out, but have you ever seen how many people pay money to see wrestling?
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: "We have too much traffic on our websites so plans are in place to drop that volume of visitors dramatically."
Good, because I'm sick and tired of only having "mass appealing" news to read. Bullshit stories that only attract visitors, looking for something "astonishing", in order to gain ad exposure. News today is free for one reason, because it's fucking worthless. If someone is able to provide a proper news service, yet to be seen since the internet era, with proper journalists I would be happy to pay for the service. But to pay for bullshit headlines and ridiculous stories, no thank you.
Murdoch has trouble charging for newspapers (Score:3, Insightful)
Last time I checked a copy of the N.Y. Post was 25 cents. Well 25c is technically charging for a newspaper but that is below the cost of distribution and printing of the paper, not to mention content. In fact, the only purpose for those 25 cents is to ensure the papers are not used for insulation by homeless people, it is nowhere near paying for the running costs of the NY Post paper. The NY Post has hemorrhaged money for as long as Murdoch has owned it.
So Murdoch cannot even charge for content even when selling actual dead tree newspapers. How he thinks he can do it online where everyone is used to getting the news for free I do not know.
Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo? (Score:3, Insightful)
Murdoch is pretty far to the "whatever side I have to go to to make the most money".
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:2, Insightful)
Only the pipe infrastructure providing the bandwidth really has to be paid, and guess what? I pay my ISP...
For the information, sure, professional wants you to pay for it...but a lot of hobbyist are willing to provide it free, and the beauty of internet is that, when you connect enough people together, you are sure to find an obsessed hobbyist for almost any subject, that is very happy to rant about his hobby and drown you in information just for the fun of it. And the info is often equivalent, if not better than what you can get if you pay for it.
Why?
Well, partly because many of those hobbyist are the same clever people that work for the commercial organisation that want you pay for this info, in fact THEY answer the question (or put the info in a DB), once you remove all the PHB and office monkeys that act as intermediaries. OR, as often, because clever people have other center of interests than what they do for a living, but are as skilled in what they do for fun as in what they are paid to do.
Sure it is annoying to answer questions constantly, but because one answer takes one unit of your time but provide the info to potentially a huge number of people, it is enough that informed people answer when they feel like it to get the system rolling.
I act as an expert, for free, on forums/newsgroup sometimes, but I do not spend much time doing that. It is so easy to do that I would not even think asking money for it...On the other hand I get a huge amount of info from a lot of people doing exactly like me. Would I pay for this information? Never, I pay already by providing MY own informations...
Thats what happen when you connect a lot of experts/hobbyists together without human intermediaries: no way for intellectual parasites to steal ...well, at least not as much as they did before. I will not cry about their lost revenue...
The Great Murdoch Firewall (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see from the Sun's website that their interweb model is not the same - just a lot of chavtastic tv crap.
The problem for the Murdoch empire is that they forgot where newspapers came from.
Newspaper originated from the owners of printing presses who started to print lists of vessels arriving at ports with details of their cargoes. This was indeed news for anyone who wanted to make money from arbritage. Soon traders paid for ads in these papers and then letters (correspondence) from various parts of the world were printed to inform the readers of events that might affect trade. Those newspapers companies were vertically integrated, they owned the printing presses and the newspapers, soon they owned or had command of the logistics systems to deliver them from door to door staff to trucks boats and planes. This created the era of the Press Baron.
While the Murdoch Empire was busy focussing on satellite television they missed the opportunity to accumulate possesions in the web, they failed to buy communications companies or felt it was too low a return for the investment. Yet they knew that print media was in a terminal decline and has been for the past fifty years where newspapers have folded or combined and magazines (especially news magazines) have seen readership dwindle.
One can only guess that these executives are so removed from the physical transaction of buying a newspaper and the somewhat more intangible concept of connecting to the interweb. Ownership of the means of delivery and ad return from cost free added value must have given them sleepless nights, or more likely they decided to ignore what they did not understand.
Now when the paradigm shift is about to render them extinct, they thrash around grasping at straws. What News International are about to create here if they go ahead with this idea, is the Great Murdoch Firewall.
Now if we could only manage to get Associated Newspapers to do the same...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail [wikipedia.org]
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think they probably have a very old fashioned view of advertising, based on print media where advertisers pay a large sum of money to get in X hundred thousand copies of the paper up front. On the internets, you pay a very small sum per page view or per click, so you pay based on actual performance rather than the paper's own marketing hype.
All that has happened here is that they have lost a price war. Murdoch was selling The Sun for 10p (~ $0.07) at one time, relying on advertising to make a profit. Now he has been undersold by websites charging 0p, and is upset about it. There is probably also a degree of people reading more impartial news sites such as the BBC's, which makes them realise how extreme his papers are.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, the only time i ever read the newspaper, is the free one available on the (underground) train to work... There's no network access down in the tunnels so the paper provides a good snapshot to read... On the other hand, the used papers always end up making a mess as people drop them on the floor, even worse when it's raining because they turn to mush.
Re:People have been spoiled... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument does not address the one important factor that will keep good news sources alive - quality. Sure, any random blogger or independent journalist can write about the news, but newspapers and large news sites don't just publish news, they edit and check it (at least in theory).
No they don't, and if you think they do you are living in a fairy tale. Time and time again over the last decade it has been made clear that they do not do this. They quote wikipedia in their articles, take corporate/political press releases at face value/unquestioningly, and get humiliated by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).
Take Slashdot, for example. The stories are submitted by non-journalists and checked/edited by non-journalists, and the result is many a biased headline or summary
Yup. And in my experience it's still higher quality than any newspaper article. I have NEVER seen an accurate newspaper article on a subject I was conversant in. Not once. Which leads me to believe they're equally worthless on subjects I'm not conversant in as well.
Journalists are rarely qualified to understand the subjects they report on, so journalism is little more than the ability to write pyramid-style articles that fit the column width and stick to a 'so-and-so said.....' formula. The only thing you can trust is that so-and-so said that, and that is on a good day.
At least with the BBC you can be reasonably sure they checked their facts and tried to present it in a more or less neutral way.
Again, only if you're living in a fantasy.
The problem Murdoch has is that his papers are not much better than the random blogger, or maybe even worse as they systematically distort the truth. People are cottoning on to this and can now easily seek out better news sources.
Murdoch's papers are not any worse than the average.
Your post is EXACTLY part of the problem, IMO. If people didn't have this bullshit hallucination that Old Media actually does anything of value anymore, we'd be a lot better off. Seriously, listening to people delude themselves with this crap--it's like there's a cult of Isis or something--it's that anachronistic.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:4, Insightful)
Another way is for the ISP's to bundle access to pay websites with internet access - and maybe offer tiers of access; similar to cable.
That thought occurred to me as I was writing my post. I dislike it for a number of a reasons (anti-trust/competition ones mostly), but concede that it may be a 'least unpleasant' scenario.
The problem is not with the corporations being replaced; it's that the essential function of a news gathering organization - reporting facts and providing informed commentary - is being replaced with a vast sea of information of greatly varying amounts of accuracy and that is often designed to push a certain POV and as such ignores anything that does not agree to that POV.
This is where I think you are dead wrong. People have this fairy tale fantasy of what they think newspapers are, and its bullshit. If we've learned anything over the last decade, it should have been that journalists are incompetent hacks. More accurately, what I mean is that the skills current journalists are trained in are abso-fucking-lutely worthless if you want any of the the virtues you just listed. The whole system needs to die if we're going to get trustworthy media again. Propping it up against changing technology is not the answer, and will not help anything.
The corporate news rooms DO NOT DO THE ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS OF NEWS GATHERING. Not in any meaningful, useful fashion. They generate infotainment for ratings. They are trained in that one pursuit, and as such no longer possess the skills to do socially useful work. This is why most newspapers are nothing more than regurgitated press releases, AP feeds, and fluff pieces. Reporters who bother to type their own stuff any more get caught plagiarising wikipedia (which is wrong on at least two levels), simply report 'he said,' 'she said' without any insight or analysis of the issue at hand, and get embarassed by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).
Further, I object to your claim that "respectable" news media aren't pushing their own POVs and ignoring anything that doesn't fit--or are you seriously going to tell me with a straight face that 24 hour coverage of Michael Jackson's death was socially valuable, and anything other than the news organizations pushing their agenda (ratings and advertising dollars) at the expense of the public good?
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:4, Insightful)
The day ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC start reporting actual NEWS instead of pro-big government bias, is the day Satan goes to work in a snowplow.
Fixed that for you.
These organizations have all been biased towards more government for the last 60 years. At least now FOX provides the alternate "we need less government" viewpoint.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>An informed citizenry is essential for a healthy democracy.
And having newspapers that are controlled by a wealthy megacorp oligarchy is the exact opposite of that. News is better when it's controlled by tens of thousands of independent individuals, each providing a different viewpoint, than when it's controlled centrally.
The "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" (Score:5, Insightful)
I have NEVER seen an accurate newspaper article on a subject I was conversant in. Not once. Which leads me to believe they're equally worthless on subjects I'm not conversant in as well.
Michael Crichton says something similar (though you have shown yourself to be an exception) in his speech Why Speculate ? [michaelcrichton.net].
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
"That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
"But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
>the Times (or, for non-Brits, the London Times) is a serious newspaper
This would be the newspaper that claimed public interest in revealing the identity of the anonymous police blogger, stopping his inside information from seeing the light of day and reaching the public, yes?
The Times at one time was not owned by Murdoch. It was a serious newspaper. He bought it and the rot began.
re: bye, bye (Score:4, Insightful)
but seriously suggesting that murdoch, who's made his fortune in making news profitable and is the biggest media mogul on the planet, doesn't understand how to monetize news successfully after ahow many years of news sites experiences is to me goofy in the extreme. you might as well suggest that redmond doesn't understand how to market a profitable OS.
ed
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:2, Insightful)
Where is this magical place where you find self-generated free news that is of a worthwhile standard and provides coverage of global events? I hear about it all the time but I've never seen it.
I'd honestly like to know, can you provide a link to a site that has (non-tech) news that isn't created by a newspaper or television, etc company. That obviously doesn't include a blog that includes links to sporadic articles that happen to appeal to the author on real news sites; I mean a site where you can go and get a large selection of current news in full. I don't believe it exists.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:3, Insightful)
What's happening is they incur cost producing Content and then they give it away for free. What kind of crazy business model is that, you make NO PROFIT.
Sorry, but you are wrong. There are a great many sites on the Internet that have shown that you CAN make a profit with free, ad supported content. It actually stands to reason in a lot of cases that ad supported content will bring more revenue than subscription, as these companies will be lucky to see 2% of their online customers willing to pay a subscription when they can get the SAME news elsewhere for free. As I mentioned before, the News is ALREADY presented to us as ad supported free content, newspaper subscriptions cover printing and delivery costs, and all the news is already on the TV and radio for free. Why is this such a difficult concept for people to grasp? Putting up a paywall on your site only guarantees that people will go elsewhere, and it is suicide.
Re:suicidal. (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, yeah. Only idiots would pay to look at Fox News.
Oh I don't know.. Fiction is still quite popular.
You want to talk about fiction? Try CNN. I got back from a year in Iraq last October, and what CNN is reporting bears zero resemblance to what is actually happening there. Michael Yon is the only guy whose writing I've seen is accurate, and he's selling his articles to Fox News. I find it funny and sad that most of the people who are still in love with "Pravda" (CNN) have never actually been to either Iraq or Afghanistan to learn how totally they're being lied to.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:3, Insightful)
I *do* click on ads that interest me. It's just that the ads that are an eyesore mean I'll block almost everything and not feel sorry about it.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:4, Insightful)
But what about the coupons for the grocery store? What are you gonna use to start the charcoal for the grill?
Seriously, it is something I like. I only take a Sunday paper, mind you, but, I enjoy getting up on Sundays, brewing a little coffee, putting a little booze in it, and then sit and read the paper. I like going through all the ad inserts, to see what is on sale around town (especially blank CD's and DVD's on sale), and I do actually like to clip grocery store coupons. I make plenty of money, but, I never sneer at saving a buck.
I'll be sad to see the newspapers go away.
Re: bye, bye (Score:2, Insightful)
What Murdoch probably does not see is that even if ALL the news sites became paid-for, people could still get a lot of their information for free. Who needs regurgitated press releases? You might as well read them yourself. Any "fluff" article usually lacks any sort of depth in old newspapers; blogs, which are mostly built for free as a hobby or which are part of a company's marketing strategy, will give far more insight than any article written by a clueless journalist. What exactly is missing to fill? Critics are a dime a dozen and I'm sure if the large news networks decided to ask for money, some other critics would fill their shoes for free. Oh, I know! You won't have your crosswords and "find the differences" games... Oh, that's sad isn't it?
The largest problem is that, since the very beginning, we have been monetizing information, something which cannot be monetized. Before the advent of the Internet, this was very possible through monetizing the medium that carries the information. However, the Internet changes this. Since anyone with 10 minutes on their hands can now produce any piece of information they want (no more do we need hundreds of hours to copy a book or huge presses to print the papers), information goes back to its free state. It's inevitable.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
At least now FOX provides the alternate "we need less government" viewpoint.
How? The last time I saw FOX News, they were talking about some racist that shimmied up a flag pole and ripped down a Mexican flag outside of a Mexican restaurant because it was flying above the American flag. They wanted laws in acted so that would be illegal to fly another country's flag higher than America's (this was a year ago, I don't live in America and only go back once a year).
To me, that's worse than trying to nationalize health care or social security or whatever beneficial program that they rave against. When I hear "less government" I always think it means getting rid of the nanny state (drug laws, forcing ID in science classes, making a law on how you have to fly your flags, keeping gay marriage illegal), unfortunately, the people spouting on about "less government" just want it out of the way so their greedy asses can rob people without being bothered (Enron et al.).
Give me someone that wants to get government out of my life, not out of my pocket.
Re:I'm not sure I get the joke (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone has bias, and it shows up in all reporting. Selecting which facts one chooses to look at and highlight and which ones you don't is in fact biased.
It would be fairly easy to simply promote all the "good" legislation one has authored, sponsored and voted on, while ignoring all the dubious ties to shady characters and claim that the reporting was "accurate".
What I find amazing is that people are so willing to ignore facts that don't suit their views, and call places like Fox News names Faux News because the bias of reporting is slanted in a different direction.
Me personally, I would MUCH rather have people freely admit that they have a "tingly feeling running down their leg" when commenting and reporting, because then at least I know what kind of facts they might be ignoring.
Nobody is unbiased, and nobody's reporting is unbiased. Pretending you are unbiased in your reporting is just a lie.
Here is a quick test, how many reports filed by these people had a strong critical look at Chicago Politics and the dubious connections between Obama and many of those in that scene?
Beware of the Political Media Complex, as you are of the Military Industrial complex. Neither is good for our country.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:4, Insightful)
and get humiliated by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).
Hey man, lay off Dan Rather. Yes he fucked up, and yes he should have admitted this as soon as it was obvious instead of sticking to his unloaded guns. But the fact is that he did do actual investigative journalism to get that story, and he did do his best to confirm the authenticity of his information. He went back to the person who would have typed the letter and asked her "did you type this" and she said "yes." Should he have done typographic analysis on the document versus samples from the typewriter it was hypothetically written on? With the benefit of hindsight, yes, of course. Is not thinking to do so in any way the same as blatantly plagiarizing or simply regurgitating press releases? No.
The point I'm trying to make is that Dan Rather is from the Old School of Journalism where journalism was not just a pretentious name for marketing like it is now. Yes actual journalists can fuck up, make mistakes, and exercise poor judgment. That's not the same as deliberately abandoning the principles of journalism from the get-go and never trying to be anything more than a mouth piece collecting a pay check. You can't lump the two groups together. By doing so, you condemn all potential and hypothetical journalists, even those you think are better because they are anything but infallible.
I mean, you use Slashdot as an example of something better. But Slashdot -- and individual editors, contributors, etc -- fuck up constantly.
Re:suicidal. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one of the reasons why modern media is so biased and uninformative - it's easier and cheaper for them to parrot the 'facts' spoon-fed to them by the government/corporate organisations,
That's one way to look at it. The other way is that virtually all media outlets in America are controlled by one of ten megacorporations which also tend to control large percentages of the media in other countries, and that these corporations are owned (yes, they're public, but look at who holds majority shares of voting stock) and controlled by the same people who are charting the rest of our financial future. Big Media isn't saying what the government wants; the government is doing what the same people running Big Media want.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:3, Insightful)
Proof?