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."
What a nice gift to progressives (Score:5, Interesting)
Fox News and the other Rupert Murdoch properties charging for access is the best thing the Dems and Obama could ask for. It will limit the reach of the biased news content put out by his properties and limit the public exposure. Also as a publisher of a small Online Community Newspaper, I hope that Gannett and the other big news publishing companies follow suit. It's win win for me.
Total crap in the news anway (Score:2, Interesting)
So, when I watch the news or read the paper, the only good stuff to read is international news anyway.
Will they be offering a cheaper or more expensive option to ignore all of the BS stories that they ram down our throats? (swine flu? little girl saves cat from tree?)
I have become so bored by general news that I literally only pay attention to international news and major US politics stories (being a US resident.)
I hope some of News Corp.'s competitors have a more forward thinking attitude about the matter, because Murdoch won't be getting one penny from me for the crap that I usually see portrayed as something I should care about.
Re:What a nice gift to progressives (Score:5, Interesting)
I often see how independent small publishers break stories, only for larger organisations to source from, but not attribute their source, several days later. This is especially true of quality blogs and online communities in niche interest or geographical areas - I run one of these. Not attributing and mandatory charging for a derivative work is not good form.
I would like to know the IP range that Murdoch companies use, in order to block them from my content.
Re:This is a good thing (Score:1, Interesting)
Right. It's so fucking easy to clean up 8 years of unmitigated spending, 10 trillion dollar deficit and the fallout for artificially leaving interest rates so low for so long.
2 years should be a piece of cake!
People have been spoiled... (Score:1, Interesting)
Since the beginning of the Web, things have largely been free. Free cannot last forever. Ads will not continue to pay for bandwidth, servers, people, etc.
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.
It's about time that things were not free. I disagree with free webmail. The amount of spam would go way down if people had to pay.
Nothing in this world is free. People have to get paid.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Interesting)
Translation: "We have too much traffic on our websites so plans are in place to drop that volume of visitors dramatically."
I think a better translation would be:
Steve (Assistant): Mr Murdoch, the Chief Financial Officer is looking at your numbers. He isn't happy at the moment.
Rupert: Well Steve, it's like this, We have this thing that makes us lots of money, but it's going up the clapper now, and we have this other thing, that no-one really understands here, and all the senior management executive reports show that if all of our customers payed for it, it would be grand, so lets do that. I am sure that the people on this interweb thing can afford it. Good job Steve, lets go out for a team lunch... Oh, also, Steve, can you download this internet for me? My kids say they can't download stuff at home cause it's too slow.
Steve: Ummm, sir? Download the internet?
Rupert: Yes! Download it, anything to stop my kids whinging when I come home.
Steve: Ummm, okay, sure.
Rupert: Great, also, can you schedule a meeting later with the board? I need to discuss how we will be investing all this new interweb money that we will be making.
Or something like that. Loads of people simply don't get the internet, I deal with them all the time here when I am presenting to senior management meetings. They know it's SOMETHING. They know that MONEY passes through it, they think that just because they do SOMETHING on this place with MONEY, they will make some of it themselves. It's the old-school business mentality coming head to head with something to revolutionary that many of the older chaps (as good at business as they are) simply don't comprehend or have enough smarts to make sense of. It's so vastly different to ANYTHING they have dealt with in the years they have been in business.
Re:Fox News (Score:5, Interesting)
As a side note, do USian's really watch fox news?
Forgive the cultural ignorance but as an Australia I'd never seen anything like Fox News before seeing it in Thailand. I watched it for about 1/2 an hour whilst sitting in a bar and there was not a shred of actual news on there all it seemed to be was scaremongering about Obama and the democrats. I'd be a bit less confused if they were using facts or at least logical conjecture but they were blaming Obama for the economic problems that started in the Bush administration and threw around the words "communist" or "socialism" at least once a sentence. I believe the report was on how Obama was destroying the country by Greta someone (cant remember, had hangover).
It was such blatant and obvious propaganda that eventually I had to ask the bar staff to change the channel (ended up with the Thai soap channel, at least that made the bar staff happy). Was my experience typical of Fox News? Fair enough I only saw about 30 minutes of it, I could have caught the "republican hour of power" without knowing but the channel is called Fox News not Fox Editorials, I kind of expected some news.
In Australia this wouldn't be permitted under the broadcasters or advertisers code of conduct. News must contain news, editorials must be in a separate program and may never be advertised as news (they call them "Current Affairs" programs and typically start right after the news).
ignore party, vote against incumbents (Score:1, Interesting)
The best choice is to ignore party and always vote (as a group, us here, and anyone we know) against all incumbents. Period. Even if the incumbent is your cousin, or best friend's friend w/ benefits... It's time to impose our own term limits..
Maybe then, we can get some real reform that would limit the control special interest groups hold over our country.
If you're serious about changing the status quo, ignore party and boot all the crooks out. There's no such thing as a good career politician. One term, then go get a real job.
Thank God! (Score:2, Interesting)
There someone had to say it!
Kharma whoring, or what?
Re:What a nice gift to progressives (Score:5, Interesting)
No argument there are all kinds of biases around but you are making a pretty weak argument defending Fox on that basisc because their bias is OFF THE SCALE.
In the left bias case you cite Rather was FIRED for that one story. Kind of says CBS applied some standards and ethics that were a LOT tougher than Fox which intentionally broadcasts false information, is proud of it, and would never fire one of their talking heads for lying as long as the lies are the Murdouch/Ailes/Rove/Cheney approved lies.
The Rather case was also not something you can claim as serious bias. The fact is everyone knows Bush deserted his guard service, possible to avoid drug testing in his flight physical because he was a heavy cocaine user at the time. The guard commander's secretary said what was in the letter was pretty plausible.
The problem with the Bush case is due to the power of his family in Texas and especially when he was governor of Texas(and commander in chief of the Texas Guard) all the incriminating stuff in his guard file was almost certainly destroyed by his operatives. You have this ugly case where Bush did something bad bordering on criminal and got away with it because his family is rich and powerful. You can't exactly blame Rather's team for wanting to nail Bush for deserting his guard duty which he certainly did. They, like everyone else in the world with a brain, didn't want to see that loser get another four years. It was a desire proved justified because by the end of his second term Bush and Co. had nearly destroyed the U.S. and everyone, including many Republicans, realized too late what a complete disaster Bush's reign was for the country.
W's eight years in power may well have ended America's ascendancy and may have started a decline which may prove irreversible.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean head to head with something too insane. What is the slashdot-supported model that he's too stupid to believe in? Would that be throwing billions of dollars overboard as youtube sinks to the bottom of profitability trying to stay free? Would that be Twitter, which currently sells no products, no paid services, and generally has no source of income at all?
Here's my model of the only possible internet. You pay for services, including downloading all content. That means paying the 10 euro/mo or whatever for rapidshare if you want to download free projects (unless they can get donated bandwidth from a university). Commercial projects can support their own bandwidth needs. If you want quality tech news, subscribe to Ars Technica - they're not going to just work for free.
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. This is literally as absurd as paying for an expensive government program by selling advertising space in the WIC offices. OK yes that's income, but I don't want my premium services depending on that kind of funding.
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.. I'm in the very very late stages [toothpastefordinner.com] before I fall asleep so none of this is probably legible. i;; see tomoreew
Re:As opposed to sheep reading left wing echo? (Score:5, Interesting)
Murdoch doesn't give a shit, it just happens that a lot of idiots buy into nationalistic sensationalism, so he sells them what they want. In the UK the sun isn't too bad compared to the mail and is more left wing than the telegraph, the (london) times and thelondonpaper arn't particularity bad either. Over here the colbert report goes out on fx, so the idea that murdoch and his nth wife sit down and tell fox news to spread right wing bullshit is pretty dumb, he just sells "news" to the lowest common denominator, he doesn't really care who's in power he's fucking loaded anyway!
Re:Well, (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree, in the short term it will probably pay off. And maybe when the economy turns around, they can lift the fee.
Also allowing people to read 1 story per day for free by registering would be sensible.
Murdoch is no fool (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He isn't.
News Corp has deep pockets and a wealth of profit-making websites.
He understands it would be suicide for his readership of his newspapers if he charged for access, but rivals didn't.
It would be a slightly slower suicide if he charged nothing at all.
So perhaps his plan is this:
1. Charge for access to all his news sites.
2. Encourage rivals to charge also (it has been already flagged that newspapers are willing to work as a bloc on this issue).
3. Watch while readership plunges at all newspaper websites following the introduction of pay-per-view.
4. Hold out until his major rivals are all broke.
5. Maintain a cost for viewing online publications
6. Close down newspaper print editions as readers migrate to paying for content online
7. Scoop up profits and increase influence
Re:Fox News (Score:4, Interesting)
You'd be surprised how many people in the U.S. watch Fox News. In fact, they are very successful here. My personal theory is that U.S. is just like many other countries with large populations (Russia, China, Indonesia come to mind) where people are hungry and very susceptible to be told how to think.
Let me give you a brief overview: this is how it works - everything is deduced and painted in black and white for you; you identify the side you don't like and associate yourself with the other side - everything has 2 sides, you see.
By associating yourself with one side you inherit all labels (e.g. conservative, capitalist, patriotic, etc.) associated with it and are told how the people under the labels on the other side (democrats, liberals, socialists, etc.) are bad. In fact media like Fox News, or radio stations need not provide any factual news for you - all they have to do is spoon-feed you the negative opinions about the other side which is supposed to give you warm fuzzies listening to the guys on your side.
God forbid someone provide a third or fourth point of view on any political subject - that would not easily be allowed on TV. People are taught there are 2 sides to every coin - can you imagine what would happen if there was another point of view that didn't fit the 2-sided theme?! The "news" channels would be losing their audience. On a very rare occasion it happens, they sometimes call it "oh, an interesting angle" and dismiss it as that, continuing their propaganda programming.
Yeah, that's pretty much how it works.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/hell.asp [snopes.com]
According to some hell has already frozen over and can't accept any more fallen priests.
To get back on topic. My question is when is the sale of all of their electronic equipment going up for sale on Ebay.com?
SCO imploded about 2 years after litigation ceased. Is Murdock going to prop up his share price with his own wealth? Or do we see the beginnings of another bailout?
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
You've also pointed out one problem with electronic distribution - it's less convenient to share; I can't give my electronic WSJ to a friend or share it with someone, it's tied to me and my compute.
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.
You are correct in pointing out that the internet is merely a distribution system, and just like the printing press changed how news was distributed which gave rise to the concept of the "press" as a profession. As people became more literate, newstands and corner newspapers replaced the town criers as the source of information. The distribution system is separate from the content; but it does not replace the underlying service provided. While a cheaper distribution system lessens part of the costs it doesn't remove the cost of producing the content.
Prior to the printing press news was collected and recorded by hand and only the wealthy could afford hard copies; that business model evolved as mass production became easier and more people were capable of reading.
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.
In each case, technology created a new way of accomplishing the same fundamental tasks as cars replaced buggies, the gramophone replaced the player piano, and repeating rifle replaced the flintlock. People still pay for the new technology because it fulfills a need.
The Benedictines did not cease to exist; they moved on to other things.
For some reason, people assume the new technology is a game changer and the old rules no longer apply; while technology certainly changes the environment and gives rise to many new ways of doing things; it's still the old needs and desires being satisfied in a different way.
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.
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.
As a result, the value of that information has dropped dramatically an
Re:Murdoch is no fool (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He is.
News Corp has deep pockets and a wealth of profit-making websites.
He understands it would be suicide for his readership of his newspapers if he charged for access, but rivals didn't.
It would be a slightly slower suicide if he charged nothing at all.
So perhaps his plan is this:
1. Charge for access to all his news sites.
2. Encourage rivals to charge also (it has been already flagged that newspapers are willing to work as a bloc on this issue).
3. Watch while readership plunges at all newspaper websites following the introduction of pay-per-view.
4. Hold out until his major rivals are all broke.
5. Watch as all his former readers turn to non-newspaper backed news aggregators
6. Maintain a cost for viewing online publications
7. Close down newspaper print editions as readership continues to plumet
8. Go bust as nobody needs to pay for news online from News International.
FTFY.
Re:What a nice gift to progressives (Score:3, Interesting)
Putting in 'traps' to catch plagiarism didn't work for Fred L. Worth.
He deliberately added some 'made up' facts into his "The Trivia Encyclopedia" including:
"Columbo's first name was Philip"
When this appeared as a Trivial Pursuit question, he attempted to sue, but it was thrown out of court on the basis that many sources had been used to make the questions. http://www.triviahalloffame.com/columbo.aspx [triviahalloffame.com]
I guess it is a case of: Copy one source - plagiarism; Copy many sources - research.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:3, Interesting)
I know online media is great, dynamic and full of selected content you want to read...but it's delivery relies on almost ten times as many nodes of transmission which is again reliant upon tons of electrical equipment (which don't like electromagnetic interference, bad storms or lightning strikes btw) as the number of nodes of transmission / equipment needed to bring you a physical news paper.
Of course there can be equipment failures at the press house, or the place can burn down or blow up or the paperboy is a crackaddict, but I think we can all agree, that there are many more opportunities for something to go wrong, when it comes to receiving the media online when compared to receiving a physical newspaper.
Also, you can archive physical news papers, clip, frame them...it's all been printed for you, and you've paid for it (well technically, you're paying a small percentage of a cost that has been heavily subsidized by the businesses and organizations who advertise in the paper but the point still stands none-the-less). With online media...it seems like now you're going to have to pay to view, and pay to get a printed copy (use your ink, use your paper, and use your electricity) and the advertisers are still subsidizing the cost of this media getting to you.
Seems like they're just looking for new ways to get you to pay more money for the same old product...same old game.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This is high debatable. The problem is that some of the viewpoints that people are passionate about (and create tons of web pages/blogs/feeds about) are simply *wrong*. Not everything has two sides, and having to try and figure out the bullshit from the sanity is beyond the capabilities (and time) of most people. Sorry folks, but
You'll find thousands of independent individuals with blogs that say otherwise. Without some relatively neutral individual calling them out (or beating the crap out of them, ala Buzz Aldrin) they'll take in a lot of people who are simply too gullible or uninformed to know better.
Exactly. (Score:3, Interesting)
And then, after infecting Australia with the tabloid poison, he went on to destroy journalism in the UK, and the rest of the world. What a hero.
Re:Bye, bye. (Score:1, Interesting)
No. OPB is not excellent. They exhibit a significant left-wing bias in their reporting. They get complaints about it regularly enough that a year or so ago they ran a campaign looking for input on how they could appear to be less biased. It was just a PR stunt though, nothing has changed. NPR has a similar liberal bias problem. It is impossible to remove bias from the news since you would have to remove the bias from the people collecting and reporting the news. This means that the only hope you have at finding balance is to read or listen to news from companies across the political spectrum and draw your own conclusions.