UK Newspaper Websites To Become Nearly Invisible 454
smooth wombat writes "Various websites have tried to make readers pay for access to select parts of their sites. Now, in a bid to counter what he claims is theft of his material, Rupert Murdoch's Times and Sunday Times sites will become essentially invisible to web users. Except for their home pages, no stories will show up on Google. Starting in late June, Google and other search engines will be prevented from indexing and linking to stories. Registered users will still get free access until the cut off date."
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:3, Informative)
As an example take a look at the Caledonian Mercury: http://caledonianmercury.com/ [caledonianmercury.com]
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And nothing of value is lost... (Score:1, Informative)
As a Chicagoan, I was glad when Murdoch sold the Chicago Sun Times.
Too much media in too few hands. News and television have become a monoculture.Some of RM's other stuff that I won't miss(from, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Corporation).:
* 20th Century Fox
* Twentieth Century Fox Español
* Twentieth Century Fox International
* Twentieth Century Fox Television
* Fox Searchlight Pictures
* Fox Studios Australia
* Fox Studios Baja
* Fox Studios Los Angeles
* Fox Television Studios
Internet
* Fox Interactive Media
o AmericanIdol.com
o AskMen.com
o Fox.com
o Foxsports.com
o GameSpy
o Hulu.com
o kSolo
o IGN
o Drownedinsound.com
o MySpace
o MyNetworktv.com
o NewRoo.com
o Strategicdatacorp.com
o Scout.com
o SpringWidgets
o WhatIfSports
* Beliefnet
* News Digital Media
* Slingshot Labs
* Authonomy via HarperCollins
Magazines and Inserts
* InsideOut
* donna hay
* News America Marketing
* SmartSource
Newspapers and Information Services
United Kingdom
News International
* The Sun
* News of the World
* The Times
* Sunday Times
* thelondonpaper (a free newspaper which closed in September 2009)
Australasia
News Limited
* The Daily Telegraph (Sydney)
* The Sunday Telegraph (Sydney)
* The Australian (national)
* The Weekend Australian (national)
* The Advertiser (Adelaide)
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. Nobody pays for single academic papers online at the publisher (well, maybe a few idiots I guess).
Well slap my rump and call me a nobody idiot. Actually, there are many journals we don't use enough to justify an annual institutional subscription. I might need 5-10 papers a year from a journal. Subscription cost might be $10,000. Price for 10 individual papers might be $300 or so at most. It often makes more sense to buy individual articles.
Re:Nothing to See Here! (Score:4, Informative)
Actually I'd say it's more like those membership stores like Costco that make you pay a fee for the privilege of shopping there.
It's admittedly successful, but that's only because there are certain people that while a relatively small percentage of the total population, can be relied upon to be so stupid as to not only submit to such treatment but to do it happily and regularly.
Similar business model when it comes to Fox News.
Costco = Fox News?
Worst. Analogy. Ever.
Everyone's missing the point (Score:4, Informative)
He's not an out of touch dinosaur, he owned an internet service provider in 1993 FFS and he's based his entire career on being surrounded by experts that can find an advantage for him in any deal. He understands the net more than many readers here - the problem is he doesn't care if he ruins it for everyone else if he can make a buck out of it.
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it is the website in both cases. The paper version of the Guardian has 283k readers, and the paper version of the Times has 502k readers. So you can see that the Guardian has made a much better transition to the online world than the Times.
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:5, Informative)
There are very good alternatives. ... why would anyone miss one option? I think he may do even worse than you suggest... I certainly agree that he has no chance of retaining 10% of his current visitors.
www.guardian.co.uk
www.dailymail.co.uk
and of course news.bbc.co.uk
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:3, Informative)
You will have free newspapers, with basic stories, handed out to commuters paid for by advertising
We already have this up here in Toronto. There's a few free basic newspapers that are readily available on street corners, as well as in our subway stations. I see people reading them on the subway all the time. Hell, I find them sitting on the seats on the way home from work because people leave them there. There's a daily general news one called 24H (formerly 24 Hours) [wikipedia.org], as well as a weekly tabloid called Now Magazine [wikipedia.org] which my wife likes because it details local events going on in different areas of the city, and they're big on environmental stuff. There's also a free weekly competitor to Now called Eye Weekly [wikipedia.org] that was setup by the Toronto Star [wikipedia.org] but Now is by far the more popular one. Anyway, my point is we're already getting to that point where people just expect their news to be free and are already getting it handed to them.
try a newspaper that has an API, not a paywall... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a developer for The Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/ [guardian.co.uk] ) - a UK newspaper not owned by Murdoch, which doesn't have any intention of becoming invisible any time soon - rather than erecting a paywall, we've spent the last year putting together a content API that allows anyone to explore our content using search terms, faceting, etc - and then build your own application upon it. Check it out here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform/getting-started [guardian.co.uk]
The implementation, written in Scala and based on Apache Solr/Lucene stack was pretty good fun (we plan to opensource it within a few months) - slides with some of the implementation details are here :
http://www.slideshare.net/openplatform/the-guardian-open-platform-content-api-implementation [slideshare.net]
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, recently gave a pretty deep lecture on the 'open vs closed' & 'authority vs involvement' questions raised by the spectre of paywalls:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/cudlipp-lecture-alan-rusbridger [guardian.co.uk]
cheers,
Roberto
(views my own, not necessarily those of my employer, yack yack yack)
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:3, Informative)
>He will be undercut by others, but he'll also use his business model failure to attack the BBC: "Unfair competition! An honest >businessman like me can't make a go of it with the likes of the BBC supplying news, with it's massive and unfair state subsidy! Do >something about it Dave [Cameron (UK PM)] or I'll say nasty things about your party in my many, many [still bought, for some reason] >print newspapers! Ya Fuckin' bitch! [The PMs of the UK all want to wiggle their bottoms suggestively for Murdoch].
Dear $LEADER,
The idea behind the BBC, as with similar channels provided by many governments worldwide is that access to important information (like the news) is a basic human right, and more importantly is a crucial factor of a successful democracy. One cannot expect citizens to be informed voters unless they have the ability to be informed after all.
In that regard it is quite akin to providing state-subsidized public schools. The benefit of ensuring as many children as possible get at least a minimal education to society and the economy is significantly larger than the actual cost in tax-payer money, which is why no government in a free country would dare to try and stop this, even if a coalition of private schools were to form and demand that the "unfair competition" be removed in the education industry.
By the same token, should Mister Murdouche attempt such a thing, please feel free to use the analogy in this letter to politely tell him where he can stick it.
As you well know, public schools are incredibly popular with the vast section of the population and for many, it's the only possibility they have of affording any education at all. Any attempt to remove it would be political career suicide.
So will any attempt to shut down state-subsidized independent news in any country where the voters have gotten used to it.
Yours Truly
$CITIZEN
---
If you expect this to happen in the UK - send a letter like that to the prime minister, and make it an open letter widely published so he looks bad if he ignores it. It's hard to beat the corporations on subtle matters, but this would be an example where the risk, I believe would so hugely outweigh the potential gain that not even a politician if dumb enough to choose wrong.
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:5, Informative)
The Daily Mail is *not* a good alternative. It's another hate-filled shitrag of bigotry and clashing themes ("We pay too much to live here, so we need to hire cheap labour" vs "oh no, not immigrants", for example)
I'd agree that the other two are good sources of news, but the Mail? Fuck, they still whine on about conspiracy theories for killing the Princess of Wales. And it still sells papers.
Relying on the Daily Mail for news is like relying on Fox News for level-headed commentary.
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:2, Informative)
You also have a right to a free press, which is not possible when government controls the funds (as is the case with pro-government-leaning PBS).
You make it sound like the entire funding of PBS comes from the government. It's $800K a year through a government grant. I'll ignore your pro-government dig, because it is clear you haven't listened to Public Radio stations, and are more interested in engaging in flaming than rational debate.
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:4, Informative)
Murdoch knows EXACTLY how the new technologies work. At least at a high-level. He doesn't need to know the detailed tech:
1 - Google indexes content
2 - Google links to content that is has indexed
Your statement " Half the time I don't even realise which site I'm reading the news on" is exactly the problem the newspapers have right now. It's not going away either. News is a commodity. Unless it's a local story, editorial or some sort of investigative reporting the news is the same across ALL papers. Hell, I work for a newspaper. Everyone pulls in news from the wire services. How many times has google sent you to jrandom midwest paper about a hot topic only to realize that the story was sourced from AP or Reuters? I can go to 20 other sites and get the EXACT same story.
He knows how it works, he just doesn't LIKE it. As someone else said, newspapers have been double-dipping for the lifetime of the product. Selling subscriptions on the front side and ads on the back. The problem is that people are willing to accept ad-supported content online in exchange for free access but I'll be damned if I'm going to patronize a web site that continues to show me ads AFTER I've become a subscriber. That attitude is simply counter to how newspapers operate. Look at the demographics of newspaper subscribers these days. The largest population of subscribers are literally DYING (something like 40% of the subscriber base is over the age of 60).
The only people who really like the current crop of offerings for print-to-ipad conversions are, surprise, newspapermen. We had a big meeting with our editor a few weeks back and he was going ON and ON about how amazing it was to read his old hometown paper on the iPad because it was just like the paper he could get there (ads and all). Seriously?
One reason the WSJ actually works as a paywall is that they have specialized content and analysis but that won't fly for the majority of print outlets making the jump.
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:3, Informative)
Examples of their douchebaggery: http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/ [mailwatch.co.uk]