Rupert Murdoch announcement

Online costs, too!

In the morning, while drinking your first coffee, you try to enter website of your favorite newspaper since you don't feel like going out to buy them, but they are asking you to pay for reading the news. Would you be ready to do that from now on?


By LJILJANA SAMARDŽIĆ
from Sombor, SERBIA


The era of free internet will end according to Australian-born global media mogul, Rupert Murdoch and his plans. Although it seems very odd and unbelievable right now, within a year public will be obliged to pay for some of the world wide known newspapers. Even now there are some websites experimenting with this business model. They are charging only for some parts of their websites.

This discussion and announcements were the result of The Wall Street Journal charging for its online content. After that, Murdoch said that free online content model is malfunctioning so it needs to be repaired, changed, and improved.

Bernard Hickey, present managing editor of interest.co.nz and past Reuters reporter says that "previous attempts to charge for mainstream news and opinion, as opposed to very high value business news or trade-specific news, have failed. The New York Times abandoned its New York Times Select service for specialised comment some time ago." He doesn't expect Murdoch's idea to succeed because "there is simply too much information, too much news and too many opinions out there already for free. Much of it is better than what can be found in the print versions of newspapers." But he still admits that there is a problem in revenue from ads, so "something has got to give".

Digital future - yes or no?

After The Wall Street Journal's enterprise the owner of News Corp, Murdoch decided that all online content must underlie subscription fee, especially because free of charge web sites are only damaging their owners, since profit is decreasing.

"There's a case that newspapers rushing on to the web to try and get a bigger audience and get more attention have damaged themselves", says Murdoch.

According to Murdoch, printed editions of newspapers will be replaced with ones on mobile panel and news will be updated regularly every hour or two. The guts, main headlines and alerts on your Blackberry or alike will be provided during all day. Murdoch forecasts that public will need up to ten or fifteen years to get used to the new way of reading the news. He also said that web sites will be vastly improved, but his pay model will have to be accepted in order to read favorite newspapers online. Within next 12 months we can expect that all Murdoch's properties will underlie his new pay model. Murdoch possesses, dare to say, the most popular and world wide known newspapers, such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Times of London, the Sun and The Australian, among others.

Most of other publishers, although accepting Murdoch's view and suggestion of gaining better revenue, are not willing to actualize it yet. They are in fear of losing their website's traffic. But, if this 78-year-old media mogul makes success there will be lot more publishers who will look up to him.

Eric Auchard, a Reuters columnist says that Murdoch's idea of micropayments might work if costs are low, "like the cost of a text message, say 10 pence a story". But he finds that problem of micropayments isn't technical. "It has to do with the fickleness of news consumers in a world of abundant free content. It's difficult to make potential readers appreciate the value of any particular news story before they read it." Auchard finds necessarily that newspaper industry has to figure out the way how to charge for online content.


(Published: 20.06.2009.)