News Corp will charge for newspapers “online”
Posted on May 8, 2009 by by valerirojas
There are news about another American newspaper possibly shutting down “Boston Globe“, which would leave Boston city with only one daily newspaper, the tabloid Boston Herald.
While many newspapers are closing down News Corp has come up with a winning formula to keep their business alive. Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation’s newspaper websites within a year. Guardian
A winning formula? maybe not but he believes if it works with The Wall Street Journal then it is possible to charge for content without losing readers.
So which newspapers are we talking about in Australia? and are you happy to pay for their current content?
News.com.au, Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph and The Australian.
Laurel Papworth also talks about The Death Cycle of Newspapers and about paying for news in her web site.
11 Comments to “News Corp will charge for newspapers “online””
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Clay Shirky wrote about this (and I shared the link here) last month.
The record for newspapers doing this is a poor one. It has rarely ever worked. I expect it will fail once more.
The WSJ may be an exception, but most of Murdoch’s papers aren’t the WSJ, and neither are their readerships anything like the WSJ’s in terms of income and need to access the info in that paper.
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agreed…
i think it will be a huge fail, people will just move onto other sites that dont charge. Specially since alot of the ‘popular news articles’ are on all of them anyways..
unless the info provided was unique and needed for certain proffesions….i dont think people would be inclined to pay for it.
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I believe that depending on how Murdoch attempts to charge for the content it may actually work. However the concept hinges on the following factors:
* quality (individuals are more likely to pay for good content)
* uniqueness or scarcity (material that can not be found elsewhere)
* target audiences (picking the right demographic)
* cost / value for money (getting the price right)
* the ability of the “big end of town” news media to cartel (restrict licensing and reuse of their unique material)
The argument is repeatedly given is that individuals will shift to news sites that do not charge for content. To a certain degree that is true at the moment whilst the major news agencies (AAP, Reuters etc) allow their content to be republished by the newspapers and other “news” websites with minimal restrictions.
If we quarantine the professional news services for the purpose of this discussion then I think you will find that there is not a lot of significant NEW and SIGNIFICANT news is being generated and reported on the web for free in a consistent and consolidated form.
The reason for this is explained simply:
* The free news services typically do not have the resources to employ and pay for journalists – thus the quality of the material is only as good as the contributors who provide material on an opportunity basis
* with some rare exceptions the free news services simply do not have the contacts nor resources to undertake significant investigative journalism. i.e. working on a story for a significant amount of time.
* for the most part free news sites rely heavily on material they “scrape” (plagiarize, borrow, steal, use etc..) from the professional news services as a basis for a lot of their reporting and a lot of these sites are actually not providing “news” but rather opinion
On the flip side if charging for content does become widespread and there is limited access to mainstream news then I anticipate that the free media sources will proliferate in the “hyper-local” arena (definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_news ) Here the local communities will make and report their own news.
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Dermott >The WSJ may be an exception, but most of Murdoch’s papers aren’t the WSJ
That is very true. I don’t believe that business model will work for all their publications.
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Valeri, yeah, I can’t see anyone’d pay for the type of content we now see on news.com.au – it’s just tabloidish garbage that is available anywhere.
I’ve used some online magazines from the US, where the older editions are free, but the current edition is free – and that is a workable model it seems. Ditto New Scientist, which allows some use for free, but more if you’re a paid subscriber. But for general news – it’d never work, and I believe the New York Times experimented with this and ditched it.
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JR: what about the ABC (and their ilk)?
Dermott: Yes, a number of news services have tried it and failed abysmally.
L
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The ABC is government funded and unless we get a major change to their charter all their own “in-house” news material is likely to continue to remain free.
You have to remember that they take feeds from the major news services. They even have this on the footer of their news pages:
This service may include material from Agence France-Presse (AFP), APTN, Reuters, AAP, CNN and the BBC World Service which is copyright and cannot be reproduced.
Already there is a prohibition via copyright on how those news services may be used (reproduction is prohibited). However. if any of those news services decide to change their licensing terms the ABC might be put in a situation where they may no longer be able to utilize the material as freely as they currently do… its hypothetical: but it all hinges on how the news services wish to monetize and license their material.
Example: Would you continue see those news articles appearing for free if for example, a $1.00 per view (yes – extreme for the purpose of illustration) or other significant licensing charge was being incurred by the ABC for each story they ran?
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Did anyone watch “media watch” last night? they showed their most popular stories for the past 20 yrs. http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/
Media Watch basically showed journalists telling lies, relying heavily on material they “scrape”, making up stories, also providing poor material, involved in fraud and so on.
So really I don’t see why many journalists believe bloggers and citizens can’t or shouldn’t tell the news? they should be happy because they no longer need to run around finding news to tell people about. They just need to go online and get all the news they want “for free”.
To be honest I don’t really mind who tells me the news/gossip, as long as I understand what they are talking about then I am happy with it.
I am sure a few Newspapers will do alright charging for their services but all of them trying to do that? I don’t believe that will work.
So who will be telling the news in a few years time? millions of citizens or a few journalists?
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Watch the media watch show online http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/program/365918
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WSJ is already a subscription site, but this article gives some insight into a possible model that NewsCorp may use for their other sites:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/afcc5024-3d97-11de-a85e-00144feabdc0.html
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/afcc5024-3d97-11de-a85e-00144feabdc0.html
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