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."
No News is Good News from the Murdock Empire (Score:1, Interesting)
I would think that most people would appreciate getting less "news" from Rupert Murdock and his Right Wing tabloids. Though the Idle section on Slashdot may never be the same.
Good - after the ridiculous election coverage (Score:1, Interesting)
I expect it from the Sun, but the Times and Sky News should at least pretend to be unbiased.
James Murdoch makes a scene at the offices of the Independent: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/22/james-murdoch-independent-dodge-city [guardian.co.uk]
Adam Boulton, Sky anchor, frankly loses the plot during an interview. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/may/10/adam-boulton-alastair-campbell [guardian.co.uk]
Kay Burley, another Sky anchor, well I'm actually speechless: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/may/08/kay-burley-sky-news-twitter [guardian.co.uk]
Between 'em, they managed to generate over 1500 complaints to the broadcasting regulator: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/12/sky-news-adam-boulton [guardian.co.uk]
Rupert can go boil his head.
Who owns the NY Post? (Score:3, Interesting)
It'll make it interesting when Slashdot has to start putting up stories from niche websites instead of mainstream if they all go behind paywalls.
Re:Google are stealing by adding value? (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is that Murdoch is a genius and a kingmaker. He has shaped the landscape of US and UK politics radically. The guy isn't dumb, and he knows his stuff.
What is happening here is hubris. He scored big on his companies making blockbusters (the movie Avatar helped fill his coffers up, so he isn't lacking for much.) However, he expects people to pay for news articles like they happily pony up money to see a Na'vi kick some corporate enforcer derriere in 3D. This is his mistake.
News aggregation sites will keep on going. They will just not index his news sites' stuff. Going to news.google.com and reading about events is not like going to see a movie. People are not going to pay per article when they can read all day free. And unless the whole Internet is replaced by a walled garden like a Compuserve (which I'm sure a lot of very well heeled people want), it will likely remain this way.
More traffic for The Guardian (Score:5, Interesting)
_Some_ people get the whole thing about distribution costs plummeting and the need for new business models. Example: The Guardian.
Others don't. Example: Rupert Murdoch.
For people interested in these matters, I suggest techdirt.com -- I am not affiliated, but I love reading their stuff.
Will people notice a change in news bias? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm very curious to see whether people will notice the change in news bias if most of the major MSM sites go behind paywalls.
For decades the MSM, which functions essentially as the marketing department of the business/government/media oligarchy, has been western society's way of defining reality.
How might people's view of the world, and their own worlds, change as paywalls muffle that particular voice and allow others to be heard?
If this does lead to of any kind social change, it will be quite beautiful that it was their own unstoppable quest for more money that led the plutocracy over the cliff.
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think any (print) newspaper can survive off internet advertising income alone.
The world will simply become more extreme.
And of course...
You could have national newspapers, but with local advertising. But since this is expensive to do (so many different print versions to distribute) they need to automate this.
Note that only 1 business model can survive mostly without advertisers -- the newspapers offering quality information for a high price to a specific subset of readers.
So they might just as well cut themselves off the net and take their chances with their readers. Swim or sink.
Re:Invisibility means no readers (Score:3, Interesting)
This will backfire. Say all news sites decide to immediately join and not have a single article on the Net. Nature abhors a vacuum. Someone will come in and fill the gap, be it more firms discussing how nifty the latest gadget is, or political figures will start sites and call them news.
I can see a political mouthpiece taking advantage of a dearth of news by filling in the vacuum with his/her rhetoric. His or her site would go from what it is now, to expanding to fill the void. It would have local chapters to get news in cities and states, E-mail, chat, and social networking, and end up being a "one stop shop" for almost anything.
End result: True news sites that try to obey journalistic integrity get pushed to the side, and mainstream news becomes run by the political pundits.
People want something to read on the Internet in the morning, and if the news sites refuse to provide this, then someone will, and it likely will be someone who has political gains by doing so.
Re:Google are stealing by adding value? (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing is that Murdoch is a genius and a kingmaker. He has shaped the landscape of US and UK politics radically. The guy isn't dumb, and he knows his stuff.
Thats why all the time he never wanted google to stop indexing his pages. He rather wanted Google et al. to pony up some dough for the privilege of advertising his newspapers....
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:4, Interesting)
People generally only visit these academic sites if they can claim the cost on expenses from their employer. There isn't anything in the Times that people need in order to do their job in the way that there is for the Financial Times, the Economist or the Wall Street Journal. I read somewhere that they need to get about 10% of their current readers to subscribe to replace the lost ad revenue. I don't think subscription numbers will be anything like that high.
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:3, Interesting)
***The scary part is what happens if his model actually works, or at least is better a better source of revenue than the current model?***
When it comes to predicting the actions of the general population, my track record is far from sterling. But I have trouble believing that anyone other than a few nutcases and librarians are going to buy subscriptions to the Times of London. Murdoch may, and I emphasize MAY, be able to set up the Wall Street Journal and Barrons as successful subscription driven operations, but the rest of his stable simply lacks enough unique appeal.
I'm guessing that the reason the Times is the subject of this experiment is that the operation is unsustainable under the current revenue model and would have been shut down in the near future anyway. I think this is probably what we Americans call a Hail Mary strategy -- put the ball up in the air in the final few seconds of a close, but lost, game and pray.
I suspect that Murdoch's newspaper empire will end up being yet another victim of the Internet's inability to handle micropayments. What would be a perfectly sustainable operation if people could simply pay ten or fifteen cents US each to read an interesting article is going to fail because there's no way to do that.
Hey rupert... (Score:3, Interesting)
Please do this in Australia too.
Getting the Daily Telegraph, Australian, Herald-Sun, Sunday Times, Adelaide Advertiser etc off the internet would be good (there are better places to find the news that matters anyway such as the ABC)
Mmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it just me or am I the only person who *won't* pay for news because it inherently means that someone is being paid to write something that someone else wants them to? "Independent" or not, I don't think I've ever paid for news services, ever, at all - the closest I got was, for a while, paying for a TV licence. I don't buy papers, I don't watch the news, I don't subscribe to any news websites. Never have done.
However, if I catch wind of an interesting bit of news (which therefore removes any political, celebrity or hyperbole news), I look it up on the Internet and have done ever since I had a connection to it. About the only "news" that I consume readily is the free paper given out on the London Underground (The Metro - you can read it online at www.metro.co.uk as a PDF each morning but I don't know if they restrict non-UK access) and BBC News. The former because it's free, simplified and I don't detect too much bias in it (despite being owned by a biased-company, but again, political news rarely interests me), the latter because, well, the same reasons.
Paying for news is very old-fashioned, older than my generation really, and likely to only give you the one-sided impression that you want. I want my news to be free, refreshing, fact-based (and therefore sometimes contrary to my opinions), otherwise what's the point in reading it? News is, basically, a form of up-to-date entertainment to me. After decades of free papers, "free" Teletext news (if you owned a working TV), "free" news programmes, free Internet news, free news texted to my phone, etc.etc.etc. who still would ever want to pay for it? You could argue that paying for it gets you "higher-quality" news (whatever that means) but I discover things that are relevant to me, that are reported fairly, and go into enough detail to get me interested in personally researching the actual truth all the time. I don't have time to follow up a lot of the things I would like to. Even the news can't keep up and often have to recycle old Science news that we've all known about for months. And you'd be extraordinarily hard-pressed to make "better quality" news than the BBC or Metro, no matter what you paid for it. Every outlet gets the same news within the same minute, everyone buys the same photos from the same photographers, everyone gets the same quotes from the relevant people. News isn't "new"s any more.
What I'd give my right-arm for would be a Metro that had a much larger Science section, that wasn't quite so dumbed down. Or a really decent IT section. Even in my areas of interest, 99% of the science / IT / maths stories are just ridiculously obvious, well-known or under-stated. But I'd only like that because it would still be distributed as free PDF's that are emailed to my inbox every morning. If you asked me to pay much more than a token donation, you'd be losing my readership. I pay for the services I choose to consume but with paid-news, I would just choose not to consume. It's really not that important to me, or makes that much difference. Ten minutes research on any subject / incident that I am interested in gets me infinitely more detailed facts than a paper could ever convey, and without the hang-back of reporting restrictions.
In the end, the "death" of news is nothing new itself. I'm 31 and I've never bought a newspaper for myself, never bought a news website subscription, or paid to view an article, or anything else. I've always wondered how *any* newspaper made money in the last 20 years, if it wasn't by advertising and a low cover-price. Metro has held on for over 10 years with the same business model, so it's obviously doing something right. Interestingly, Murdoch's copy-cat paper "thelondonpaper" (Yes, apparently they don't know about spaces and capital letters) went under trying to survive with the same model.
News isn't worth paying for - it's a five-minute distraction on the way into work and/or two minutes research saved for anyone that actually WANTS to know the facts about anything. As it
Too much greed (Score:5, Interesting)
Same as the media industry in general. Radio and TV used to be funded primarily by advertising.
Those were relatively low revenue businesses, after all no one cared to pay too much for a newspaper they throw away at the end of the day, and no one cared to pay to listen to the radio or watch TV. It's different from buying a car or clothes or any other durable item that you would use for years.
Then pure unadulterated greed came in. Now they want to charge us for every image we see, for every sound we hear. They want to put meters in our eyes and ears. I say fuck them.
Let them go broke if advertising doesn't pay enough. Let other investors come in, investors who are smart enough to know they cannot charge more than people are ready to pay.
What a shame... (Score:1, Interesting)
I'll really miss the jingoistic right wing ultra-nationalist/nazi rants from 'The Sun', combined with the soft porn, and the usual collections of vacuous 'celebrity' inspired tat.
Or, how about the sombre, dreary ring wing rant drone of 'The Times', as it peddles Mr Murdoch's profit centered, neo-liberal ideology of greed, and powerful corporate interests.
Thank you for being so greedy, Mr Murdoch - and good riddance.
Google is helping Murdoch build the paywall (Score:1, Interesting)
This appears to be an experiment by Murdoch *AND* Google, so you can bet a *LOT* of business folks are watching this move.
Just over a week ago, this showed up on The Financial Times website:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a411a2de-62b7-11df-b1d1-00144feab49a.html
===
Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, said the internet company had had talks with Rupert Murdoch and other newspaper proprietors about helping run subscription services for their online sites.
The talks may indicate a thawing of hostilities between Google and newspapers – particularly Mr Murdoch’s News Corp titles.
Mr Murdoch has repeatedly criticised Google for undermining newspapers by allowing internet users too much access to their valuable news content. Last November, he threatened to sue Google for including headlines from News International, which publishes of his UK titles, in its search results.
The Times and Sunday Times UK titles are next month set to introduce a paywall limiting access to their online news sites to paying customers. The papers will also withdraw their articles from Google’s search engine.
However, it seems that Google could still have a role with news sites – perhaps getting them to use the Google Checkout service to help subscribers pay for content.
Mr Schmidt said he had a good relationship with Mr Murdoch, “outside of public posturing.”
“We have talked to Rupert and quite a few others. I think we currently have peace. We have talked to News Corp and other companies for a months on these sorts of things,” Mr Schmidt told journalists on Tuesday at Google’s Zeitgeist conference outside London.
“I would rather not talk about specific news on any deal. But we are a platform, not a competitor to newspapers. Today we have an advertising answer for them, but we would like to have other answers for them as well.”
Mr Schmidt said he believed online news sites would have a combination of revenue models, including advertising, subscriptions and micropayments.
Google’s proposals for using Checkout have met with a wary response from media groups, however, with some arguing that it had more to gain than the newspapers from such an arrangement.
Ebay’s PayPal, Checkout’s much larger rival, has also been angling for a role in subscription payments.
Mr Schmidt was keen to stress that Google was not interested in competing with newspapers for content.
“Google will not get into the content business, but we can build tools for it,” he said.
==
Re:The difference between price and value (Score:4, Interesting)
People are willing to pay for the paper edition because it gives them several benefits over the same content on a website edition. The biggest is convenience: you can take the content with you and read it where ever you happen to be.
You've made some good points, but I'd offer the following: I continue to subscribe to newspapers, periodicals and magazines for a number of reasons, none of which include convenience.
It's certainly possible that a Kindle-like device may revolutionise reading in general, and the newspaper/magazine industry specifically (publishers are certainly hoping it does). But until that happens, I'll continue to pay for print subscriptions .. and bemoan the downward spiral of things.
No Country for Old Journalists. (Score:2, Interesting)
So.. Pure News Journalism is dying out. What do we have then?
Bloggers and Company/Government Statements?
Hmph, I disagree with a lot of people that say good riddance to the lies from newspaper. Where do YOU think the source of information will come from if people don't get paid anymore to do investigative journalism.
Re:No Country for Old Journalists. (Score:3, Interesting)
How much investigative journalism is still done nowadays? If you look at the articles, that's 95% slightly edited or even verbatim reprints from syndicated content; content they get from a couple of big news agencies like Reuters, AP, etc...
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:4, Interesting)
Whoa whoa whoa there, bucko. Don't accuse "NewsCorp" of reporting the news! Allow them to be what they want to be -- a shill for the opinions of one megalomaniac named Rupert.
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, Not to defend the News Corp decision, because I do disagree with it, but we have to admit, the oldline news services are in a bit of a bind.
They are used to being able to make money both on the front end (Selling newspapers and/or subscriptions) and on the back end (selling ads that are placed in their newspapers or via TV sponsors.) With the rise of the internet, New Media sources are eating into their reader/viewership and thus their bottom line.
The real issue for the old media sources is that many internet news "sources" are simply aggregators of news from other sources, with most of those sources being the old media websites! So the old media has to bear all the traditional costs of running a news outlet (paying for personnel, buildings, IT assets, travel expenses, benefits packages, etc.) but are losing revenue to new media outlets that have either none, or significantly less of those same cost outlays, because they are often a single person running a website, or a small staff of people working in a small office running a website.
A primary example of this is one of the most most popular new sources on the web, The Drudge Report. Regardless of your personal opinion of Matt Drudge, one must admit that his site is very very popular. Who runs The Drudge Report? Well, pretty much just Matt. (Although he may have some staff now, I don't honestly know for certain.) And what IS The Drudge Report? Mostly just a news aggregator. Yes, it has broken several unique stories over it's lifetime, but it's MOSTLY just an aggregator. There are other sites that operate on similar principles, (/. itself would make another excellent example) and they make up the bulk of the "New Media" market.
So what is a company like News Corp do to? They are losing traditional front-end sales to News Aggregators, and are losing back-end ad sales to Ad blocking technology. If they don't make money they don't survive. So can one REALLY blame them if they decide to go paywall?
Personally, I think that there are better options, such as Partial paywall or better ad delivery that doesn't rely on unsecure 3rd party ad delivery services or more smoothly integrated non-flash ads that are both harder to block and less likely to spur attempts to block.
I'm sure others can come up with even better ideas, but I think we all need to admit that these companies need to be allowed to conduct their business in the way that they see fit without us siting here and just demanding everything for free and expecting them to run on well-wishes and nice thoughts.
Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, I'm not sure the analysis is that hard. The more I read newspapers, the more I get the feeling they are becoming all the same only with different headers. Less and less is news they've dug up, more and more it's just current events they can do a story on. So it's slightly more than the commentary and reviews and rehashed press releases bloggers can do, sometimes they send people out with cameras and doing interviews but it's something every paper who bothers to check the event calender and has a press card can do. Constant rounds of layoffs confirm this impression, today you don't have have time for anything but "guaranteed" stories.
You can stay on that ride all the way down, but is there money in it? It's very little like journalism and more like AP or Reuters, mass producing stories for next to nothing. That, and the market can simply be oversaturated meaning companies will in the short term sell themselves for below cost rather than fold. Of course the one with the deepest pockets will be left standing but those pockets will be awfully much slimmer before you get there. So he's bailing on a market that he doesn't see a future in, for a market he thinks there might be a future in. If there isn't, I'm sure Murdoch has some infotainment shows on TV he can promote instead so it's not like the bets are that unhedged.
Worst scenario: propaganda becomes news (Score:1, Interesting)
Traditional media got greedy on the net (Score:2, Interesting)
1.) A while back I needed some extra cash, so I took several paper routes. The newspaper is the main one for the area I live in, they charge 75 retail. However, it turns out that NONE of this money goes back to the publisher. The money collected from home delivery, machine sales & retail store sales is divided up this way: The Route manager gets a 1/3, the truck driver gets a 1/3 & the point of distribution(paper boy, store, machine filler) gets a 1/3. The publisher takes nothing, they get all their money from the ads.
2.) Some time ago I co-owned a small retail store. We sold a few magazines. We paid for the first month of all the mags we wanted to sell, then nothing more for as long as we were in business. I was a bit confused by this, so asked many questions of the distributor. He said: most mags work this way. The publisher makes their money from the ads & gives them to the distributor, often paying the distributor a small amount per mag "placed." Some stores actually get paid for placement of certain mags, in addition to keeping all the cover price. Subscriptions work the same way, which is why publisher's clearing house can have such a huge sweepstakes prize.
And they don't have any idea of how many people looked at the ad on page 147, more less even went to the manufacturer's website or looked for the product at the grocery store. My understanding is that web ads, while gleaning much more customer info, are far cheaper. It doesn't make sense to me...