

Murdoch signals end of free news - matt1
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8186701.stm

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bjelkeman-again
What news do I pay for? I subscribe to the Economist, New Scientist and The
Guardian Weekly. All are weekly niche magazines (one in a newspaper format)
and two of them give access to all their archives when you have a paper
subscription (Economist and New Scientist).

What news will I pay for in the future? If every newspaper website became a
walled garden (unlikely), then I would probably go to the BBC for the
headlines and make do with the weekly news I get from what I mentioned
earlier, as well as specialist "news" sites, such as Hacker News, Slashdot
etc. There is actually very little news which I am interested in "as it
happens". Most of it I want with an accompanying analysis, which is why I
subscribe to the weeklies.

What do I think the future will look like? Lots of specialist outfits like
Hacker News, Arstechnica, profitable walled guardens like the Economist and
New Scientist and free public sites: BBC, NPR and a ton of "free" (advertising
powered) sites with marginal to no journalist staff. Maybe. There is most
likely a business model or two in there somewhere which we haven't figured out
yet which will surprise us all.

Paying for anything which Murdoch supplies? Hardly likely (unless he owns one
of the above :). I didn't do before and I am not doing it now. Of course, I am
not Joe Public.

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mdasen
Maybe it's just me, but I sometimes wonder why web advertising isn't better at
supporting services. Print advertising is really lame. It just sits there on
the page - no way to interact, no way for it to have animation or video, no
way for it to be targeted toward the user's preferences. And yet those dumb
ads have done well. Heck, web ads give the user an instant way to click
through and act on the ad! Is it just that marketing people are slow on the
uptake? Maybe (since there are no metrics) they believe that print ads are
more effective than they are.

The problem with charging for news is that people on the web aren't going to
be single source like they would with newspapers. It's unlikely that someone
is going to say "I'm content with only one news website" and get a
subscription to that single site. Rather, they want to pick and choose the
articles they like from many sites. And so subscription pricing doesn't really
work because if you charge $5/mo, news might be worth that to me, but I'm not
going to pay that multiple times to multiple sites that I want to pick and
choose from.

And if you decide to charge per article, well, how am I supposed to know if an
article is any good before reading it? And once I've read it, I won't want to
pay for it because I already have the information. That contrasts to a song
heard on the radio that I might want to listen to many times.

And the web makes it easy for anyone to publish and to a wide audience. I
doubt that you're going to get all your competitors to charge alongside you.

I think that the big issue is probably that radio/tv/print ads have been
overestimated in their effectiveness or that marketing people don't understand
the effectiveness of web ads. With metrics on how many clicks an ad got, one
could simply surmise that only that number of people were affected by the ad.
But those other ads effectively have a click rate of 0 since clicking isn't
possible and yet it's assumed that they're effective. And with that
miscalculation, they're only willing to pay small amounts for the ads.

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Ardit20
"Heck, web ads give the user an instant way to click through and act on the
ad"

And that is the problem. Because the ads in print just sit there, the only way
to measure the effectiveness is in increase in sales. On the web however, the
sales are web sales and the advertiser forgets completely that a customer
might have seen the ad and decided to go to the shop instead. So it's
advantage is its downfall aswell since it constrains the metric used to
measure hence undervaluing the effectiveness of web advertising.

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jacquesm
Oh the irony. For years people have wondered how they could curb the power of
Murdoch, now he does it all by himself.

Bring it on, I would like to suggest $10 / article as a starting price, then
increase the price to maintain revenues on a monthly basis.

I give it a maximum of three months before he'll come to his senses.

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matt1
Don't you think they have spent a lot of time thinking this through,
consulting with experts, and debating internally whether its been a good
decsion? At least I hope they did.

If there's a chance they could successfully pull off a system where visitors
pay a few cents for a quality article, why wouldn't it make sense for them to
do it?

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jacquesm
Because they're panicking.

Their business model is under threat from 'free' stuff and so their response
is to do what worked in the past, close the gates and set up a toll booth.
Only this time it won't work, there are 100's of little side roads now, and
you no longer have to use the 'main' road to get the news you are looking for.

People used to be 'loyal' to their newspapers, that's why the payments rolled
in. That loyalty is very low, as long as the writing is good I really don't
care whether I'm reading my stuff in German, French, English or Dutch and from
what newspaper or other outlet it comes. So many choices, it's a delight. The
AP feed relaying to fill the newspapers was a clever idea to save some money
at the time but in the long term it backfired, it meant that there was less
reporting in general, not that the reporters that were freed up were used to
go digging.

It's only a matter of time before google or some other large party will hire a
bunch of reporters directly and gets them to make the missing element (quality
editorial content) and with the trouble at the regular newspapers I'm thinking
that it will be a buyers market when they do.

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nir
WSJ charges for articles, seems to be working ok for them. Same with the New
Yorker and IIRC Financial Times(?). I wouldn't be quick to dismiss this
option.

As for the Google Times option, I think it'll bring about more problems than
solutions. You don't build a quality newspaper by "hiring a bunch of
reporters". There's a lot of accumulated knowledge in places like the NYT or
WSJ. What we see from the web - from leading "reporters" investing in the
field they're supposedly covering to opinion pieces by Jenny McCarthy and Jim
Carrey - is far from encouraging.

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halostatue
WSJ and FT are specialized news and analysis that cannot be obtained
elsewhere. Unless _everyone_ in the newspaper industry starts charging all at
once, the pay walls for other news sites will effectively go away.

IMO, this sort of thing is ultimately inevitable, and I don't think that the
Internet is the ultimate cause (it's an accelerant, at best) -- I think that
it's been getting harder for newspapers to compete with the depth of coverage
provided "for free"* by television news organizations.

* When's the last time you paid a bill to CNBC or CNN? I don't pay an explicit bill for CBC Newsworld -- it's included in my cable package.

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nir
David Simon recently urged the NYT and WP to start charging, at the same time:
<http://www.cjr.org/feature/build_the_wall_1.php?page=all>

The cable model is interesting. Perhaps such sites could work out deals with
ISPs - you'd pay a few more bucks each month and in return get free account on
WSJ, NYT etc.

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jacquesm
The 'at the same time' is telling. That's collusion.

AFAIK that is an excellent way to get into trouble with the law, and if it
isn't then it should be.

You are supposed to come up with your price independently and without
'backtalk' in the boardroom.

If two gas stations get caught doing this they'll end up in serious trouble, I
don't see why it should be any different when you're running newspapers.

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nir
Yeah, he's aware of that.. "And when the Justice Department lawyers arrive,
briefcases in hand, to ask why America’s two national newspapers did these
things in concert [..] you can answer directly: We never talked. Not a word.
We read some rant in the Columbia Journalism Review that made the paywall
argument. Blame the messenger."

Check out the article - it's the same guy who created The Wire, he's not a bad
writer :)

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jacquesm
To tell two people to collude does not give them any right to do so claiming
there was no communication between them, effectively there was. They both
could check if the other party was holding up their end of the deal on their
respective websites. I highly doubt a judge would fall for it.

It's clever though, that's for sure. But like most typical layman attempts at
'hacking' the court system it would probably fail. Judges are not nearly as
stupid as people seem to take for granted.

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nir
Sure, he's not really serious about that. But I think it's not improbable that
many publications will start charging around the same time. The competition
factor is overrated, IMHO - people who really want to read the Times will pay
even when the Post is free, just as raising the print price to $2 increased
revenues even though it's freely available online.

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maukdaddy
"Quality journalism is not cheap,"

Fox News must be the cheapest news show to produce then ;)

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ScottWhigham
How long before someone in <insert non-EU or US country> creates a company,
pays the $99 fee (or whatever he wants to charge), and then just re-publishes
the articles for free on an AdSense-supported WordPress site? You can cry
"copyright!" all day long but people/countries who don't care, don't care. And
good luck convincing China to shut down a blog that is re-posting content.

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Ardit20
Well, I think the publishers would feel very safe in regards to your idea if
the country of choice is China. I think they would worry about someone in say
Sweeden instead :P

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jcromartie
s/free//

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joubert
Yeah, suck the wingnuts dry.

