"To thrive in the digital age, media companies need to persuade consumers to pay for news online by providing compelling information in any form they want, News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said Tuesday.
Murdoch said the future is promising for publishers that can adapt to the ongoing migration of audiences and advertisers to the Web. Key to survival, he said, is giving consumers what they want how they want it — be it on a computer, mobile device or e-reader — and then charging for it, as his company already does with The Wall Street Journal.
'We need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high-quality, reliable news and information does not come free,' Murdoch said. 'Good journalism is an expensive commodity.'"
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This has been tried before, and it failed. People will flock to sites that give news for free. That free site will have enough traffic to lure advertisement dollars. The pay sites will not flourish, will never flourish, because any competitive news org will see it as an opportunity to gain some fast ad revenue. And if you think they will get away with collusion, I believe you will be mistaken.
If anything, maybe news orgs will pay Google News or Yahoo News a modest fee to feature their articles in order to lure people to their site, to turn a profit via ads. That seems more like a solution that revisiting the old attempt of making people subscribe to read news online. That's just silly... you'd have to get the BBC and every other news org to participate, willingly, without collusion. Ain't gonna happen.
Rupert is a smart guy, but he's apparently stuck in a paradigm. Either that... or he's working to get federal money. Hmm....
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
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