What the hell is this? Twitter? some blag? Where on earth is the link to TFA?

Could we have a link to somewhere that actually posts this alleged request that Rupert Murdoch supposedly made? I've seen the quote in the summary before but I'd really like some source for the alleged request besides the summary of a slashdot posting.

I was just about to post this... Everything he controls is pure blather and bustle. I hope he starts 'charging' so he can find out how much people truly value his sputem.

I can see why he expects this information... he's a publisher who's spent the lion's share of his career dealing in print media. If people were subscribing to the dead-tree edition of the Journal, he would have not just their names but their home addresses and probably phone numbers as well. Now subscribers want to pay for the same publication--the Wall Street Journal--and the publisher expects to have the same information they would if they were sending the physical newspaper. What's the big deal? Just cause something is delivered electronically rather than via the post, that makes basic subscriber information suddenly privacy-threatening?

I'm as paranoid about privacy concerns as the next [rational] person, but I don't see what the big deal is here.

Maybe Murdoch ate the link?

Murdoch represents the old business model and has a hard time to understand new approaches.

New models are tried out all the time, but unfortunately some are too intrusive which produces counter-measures like AdBlock Plus. The upcoming generation is used to get news and everything in short snaps online, via SMS and on TV. The old media as newspapers are can survive only if they find the right model that attracts both old and new readers.

It will be painful, and anyone failing to adapt will die. Murdoch seems to have a hard time to adapt, and he may well lose unless he finds things that can attract people enough to buy the newspapers.

Except in this case, they aren't subscribers. They are the folks that buy a copy from a reseller before hopping on the L to head to work. And Murdoc has never had the names, addresses, or any other information about those people.

-Rick

He may be old, and he may be singing a tune you don't like, but he was old when he decided to change the media business, and he did. Massively and permanently. The changes may suck, or may not, but pretending it's pretty naive to think that because he is old, or doesn't do things the way you want, it follows that he is weak and ineffectual. He is neither.

Am I the only one that thinks this is a good thing? The grumpy generation of naysayers will die out with a loud, painful scream as they refuse to cooperate, even on the basic level, with the new information generation.

Right, because if you're against one entertainment "news" network, you're obviously in favor of their competitor. I commend your logic.

eBay does the same thing. Friend sells PC, man gets it and gives positive feedback. Man disposes of PC. Man asks friend for money back because PC broken. Friend asks for PC back to check it. Man tells friend he's dumped it. Man asks eBay for money back. eBay gives money back. Friend tries to get money back from paypal as he's now out of pocket. eBay refuses to answer questions/refund money. Friend can do nothing about it. Friend stops using eBay.

Amazon/eBay have millions of customers and can afford to piss off loads before it becomes a problem for them.

"As I've said before, the traditional business model has to change rapidly to ensure that our journalistic businesses can return to their old margins of profitability," Murdoch said. "Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting."

Profit is not what pays for the journalism so that makes no sense. Also, if you don't want to play on the free market (where profit, theoretically, is supposed to head to zero because of competition) then... well, I guess then you alter the views of the people by using mass media to put yourself as the king and ruler instead of a market player, but he'd never do that.

He'd have this info if you had to buy the subscription directly from the WSJ rather than through Amazon.

Yes, but he wouldn't have this information if you walked into a book store and bought the paper from them, even if you bought the paper every single day which seems closer to how the Kindle process works.

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-murdoch-sees-eventual-break-with-amazon-over-kindle-active-talks-with-s/ [paidcontent.org]
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/05/murdochs-ultimatum-to-amazon-give-us-the-names-or-else/ [dailyfinance.com]

This is very disappointing...both because of the hyped-up /. summary and the overreaction of some of the media to his statements, made as a response to a question in a telephone news conference largely about News Corps.' financial side.

A former journalism teacher of mine prohibited the use of adjectives and to the word "I" outside quotation marks in news stories. Taking the /. summary as an example, we are left with nothing but a (relatively) reasonable quotation from someone (Murdoch) who has already spoken about this.

This summary is *wrong* on so many levels. It has severely overhyped the event and set up a straw man in that Murdoch speculated about asking Amazon for his subscribers' info but has not yet done so.

And where is /.'s moderation? How in the world did this ever get published on /.? Has /. become Digg?

1) Your current system of distribution is antiquated.
2) Your overhead is way higher then that of a company that could poach your writers, pay them more, and still have a higher level of profit.
3) Your alternative sources of revenue (reselling consumers information, gathering statistics, polling info for your subscribers) shifts to another vendor that is actually innovative (Amazon)
4) You are caught in mid-stride supporting a old system and new system at the same time even lower profits.
5) You could piss off the wrong people and get your revenue share reduced or a competing paper get higher priority / advertising inside amazon

Right now Amazon is trying to get off the ground... but in a couple years the power should shift from the product source to the distribution chain.
Amazon & Apple could grow to be the next RIAA.

Basically Rupert is a publisher without control of his distribution chain.

There's pros and cons to that, I think. There are downsides to a central administrator like Amazon, because they can corner the market, anything that sucks now sucks uniformly, etc. But there are also upsides: you don't have every random publisher and individual you purchase something from processing your credit-card number, you don't have to individually route disputes through each of them, etc.

Yeah but the reason I buy from amazon is that I only have to trust that one very trustworthy vendor. Only Amazon has my card info and my address. If I want to buy a book, that doesn't mean that some random bookstore in North Dakota now has my personal information.. it's all handled through a trusted party.

"'As I've said before, the traditional business model has to change rapidly to ensure that our journalistic businesses can return to their old margins of profitability,'

Those old margins are gone. Sorry Rupert.
OK, I am not sorry.

Why do you need the names of your subscribers?

"foxnews.com, he said, will also start charging for content. "It has a huge and loyal and profitable [web] audience already," he said."
wait, didn't you jst say it wasn't and that's why you are going to start charging?

I hope Bezos calls his bluff and gives him the finger. What, Murdoch is going to toss the current Kindle income out the window?

Quality journalism isn't available from Rupert Murdoch's titles so I'm not quite sure why he mentions it at all.

Yes, but you would pay a lot more buying the newspaper from the bookstore than through a subscription.

Funny how the "pay more to keep my info private" option seems to be disappearing...

In the US we have moved from having a 1960's type society that is local/national with very similar interests to a society that is very diverse.

What we think is newsworthy varies greatly. I read technical news information, Eve-Online news, and have completely lost interest in local and national news because it is so depressing.

Traditional news sources simply can not cover everything. So having a portal to bring the news an individual want to hear about into a central location is where things are going.

The journalistic sources that can accomplish this will be the victors of this change. I would love to sign into my news account and have detailed journalist analysis of the latest things going on in non Concord space, insights into the specific software packages I use, and what's new in the world of Maltese K9s.

Just repeating news releases and the same thing I can see on CSPAN, sans the spin, as well as bogus headlines such as "We caught Bin Laden" (AP/Reuters) is not going to cut it anymore.

My opinion.

Okay, I was just going to post the obligatory "You must be new here" response, but seriously - are you new here? Pretty much EVERY Slashdot article with a subject a good chunk of the Slashdot crowd feels strongly about (e.g. anything from the Bush presidency; anything that mentions the RIAA/MPAA; Bittorrent; SCO related news; any case where an online entity doesn't want to give their property away for free; anything about Microsoft or Apple - although those submissions alternate between being rabidly pro- and blazingly anti-) displays a similarly slanted and ill-informed bias.

You do realize that there is no drop-in replacement for cable, don't you? I'd hardly liken paying for a regionally monopolized service to paying for a website.

Even if they do get a subset of people to pay... they aren't going to be the young generation that has already lived with free content.

I'm sure that some subscription models work better than others, and can even sustain a website for an amount of time, but the barrier of entry into the website market is incredibly low, and there's always someone who wants the attention enough to make their content free.

The way I see it is that they might retain some of their viewership, and even stay afloat, but it will certainly not grow unless they come up with a 'killer feature'.

More to the point - the Newscorp (And the Journal), like any other company, have every right to subcontract out service. Or not subcontract out service.

But there is a real entitlement issue going on when, having done so, they think it's somehow unfair for them to not know the clients of the subcontracter. Hate to tell you this Murdoch, welcome to the world of real business.

Pug

He must know everything about quality journalism to be able to avoid it so perfectly.

There, fixed that for you.

Since it pays.

Moving paper costs more than moving electrons.

Except that Murdoch is making some fundamentally flawed assumptions about the business and market.

He assumes that what's wrong is the business model, as if nothing about journalism, publication, advertising or content has to change to capitalize on a fundamentally different market.

Murdoch seems to be expressing the view that the "problem" with the internet is that information isn't scarce enough and he's entirely missing the point. Information was never actually scarce, it just wasn't distributed as evenly as it is now. The only way to make information scarce on the internet is to make up your own stories and put up a paywall. Everything that doesn't originate with you will route around you somehow.

Putting up a paywall around the same old stuff isn't going to make us spontaneously want to pay for it.

Depending on what he's asking for, that isn't exactly fair either. You can buy individual copies of the WSJ for your Kindle, or you can by a yearly subscription upfront such that it is delivered to your Kindle automatically each day. As far as I'm concerned, asking for the contact information for the latter is reasonable, the former is not.

Slashdot Rule #37: ???
Slashdot Rule #38: Profit!

Except that, ever since the 1984 debacle, Amazon's trustworthiness, especially in regards to the Kindle, has been slowly eroding away. I'm definitely waiting to see what Amazon does. If they do hand it over, deleting all of the personal data in my account may be worth considering.

In fact, by any reasonable measure, "digital culture" has vastly increased publishers' awareness of who their customers are and what, precisely, they are reading and ignoring. So the premise of the summary's bias is blatantly false. Right or wrong, Murdoch's demand is perfectly in keeping with the times. And it is not at all a foregone conclusion that Murdoch's business instincts are wrong; he believes good reporting is worth paying for, and Kindle WSJ subscribers are examples of precisely that.

What does Rupert Murdoch, of all people, know about Quality Journalism?

He knows it's expensive, which is why he doesn't pay for any.

"All he's going to do is alienate foxnews.com viewers who are feeling the crunch more than Murdoch is."
No, that's incorrect. The typical Faux News viewer will believe exactly what Rupert & Co. tell them to believe. If they could think for themselves then they would at least occasionally view other news sources (and with internet access that would include an occasional non-U.S. news source).

Why was it profitable to create news outlets in traditional media from advertising money and not on the internet?

The bane of internet advertising is direct feedback. With print media, businesses would run advertising and simply hope it is working. They would renew their ads every week. In the internet age you get instant feedback on how successful it is.. number of page views, number of clicks. Poor performing ads get pulled quickly, providing less revenue.

We are at a time of transition. Many younger people consume their news entirely from the internet. While it isn't the whole population, it is growing at a very high rate. All we have to do is wait. When enough people are using the internet for their news, and enough advertisers realize that it is page hits and not clicks that matter, there will be plenty of revenue to be had producing quality news... probably even more revenue than before since the distribution costs are so much lower.

Yes, notice the word "culture". Of course Amazon COULD turn over the goods on their users (likely they'd have to change their privacy policy, but that's doable). The question is SHOULD they, and would they suffer backlash and a loss of faith and face as a result.

I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes." I don't want my name and various demographics going to Rupert Murdoch, even if I do subscribe to his rag (which, sadly, used to be an excellent paper).

Amazon's trustworthiness is not and has never been an issue. Their willingness to champion consumers in intellectual property disputes is not a matter of trustworthiness, and would never have any bearing on my expectation of privacy. If they ever violated that, I'd cancel my Prime subscription in a heartbeat.

FTFY. Please correct me if I'm wrong and you have evidence of this "slow erosion" of their trustworthiness.

Slashdot has 36 rules!? Fuck me I never got past:

Rule #1: Post banal comments
Rule #2: See #1

Things will remain free because that's what the marginal cost drives them to.

While we all like the sound of this, it's fundamentally wrong. The marginal cost is small, not zero. Disregarding that, there are fixed costs which must be paid.

Imagine a hypothetical reporter who writes a story. It's a tiny story, so let's say it takes just $100 to pay all the costs associated with producing this story. We slap it on some website where a million people view it for free. Our cost to provide it to the million and first? Quite close to zero. Easily arguable at less than a cent, so we charge nothing. Net revenue? Zero. Net cost? $100.

If this was your business, would you produce another story? Of course not. Revenue has to come from -somewhere- to cover the $100 and make a profit, or the sensible business will just stop doing it.

Could you remind me what the connection is between Murdoch and good journalism?

Since when has any member of the Murdoch media empire ever engaged in "Quality journalism". This is the owner of Fox News who went to a court of appeals to affirm their right to force their journalists to lie in their broadcasts. This is the owner of the network which, in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq, ran stories that Saddam had drones he was planning to use to spray chemical and biological weapons on American cities.

Granted the WSJ is probably still doing useful reporting, I don't think Rupert has managed to infect it with his spin machine.... yet.

I'm an Amazon Prime member, but I won't stay one for long if Amazon starts giving in to extortionate demands like this one.

Agree. I like Amazon & have an Amazon Prime membership. That is toast, if Amazon is going to get all kissy-feeley with the creeps at FOX/Newscorp. Despite a lots of initial skepticism, I was getting progressively more interested in the Kindle. The 1984 debacle restored me to sanity. That Amazon would even consider a bullcrap demand like this puts the Kindle out into Inter-Galactic space for me--and there ain't no warp drives, Scotty.

"It's impressive when a contradiction of that caliber makes into the same sentence."

Not really, its more just a brutal realization that the U.S. is locked in to the death grip of a two party system where both parties completely suck. They have so completely stacked the system against third party and independent candidates, and the media is so stacked again third parties and independent candidates, about the only useful role left in our elections is for independents to hold their noses and pick the lesser of the two evils. It is a useful role except when independents failed and picked Bush.