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Media Dinosaur Roars At Comet After It Slams Into Its Face…

murdoch
Newscorp superhero Rupert Murdoch pushes back against the internet while milking it at the same time...

The almost spastic and totally abject dissolution of the print news media has been something I’ve watched with growing horror over the past few years. They’ve had nearly 20 years to adapt, streamline and prep new revenue models to excel through the ascendancy of the internet, but with very few exceptions they’ve flubbed it. The ensuing road looks very rough indeed, and if Newscorp CEO Robert Murdoch has his way, the road of the fifth estate is about to get a lot rougher.

On the heels of suffering $3.4 billion in losses since January, the media giant has come up with a not so bright solution. Like a dinosaur roaring at a comet after it slams into its face, he plans on charging internet readers for news content.

Mr Murdoch said he was “satisfied” that the company could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”.

“The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution,” he added.

“But it has not made content free. Accordingly, we intend to charge for all our news websites. I believe that if we are successful, we will be followed by other media.

“Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting,” he said.

In order to stop readers from moving to the huge number of free news websites, Mr Murdoch said News Corp would simply make its content “better and differentiate it from other people”.

Dude. Good luck with that (I just love how the guy behind Fox News can use “good” and “reporting” in the same sentence without throwing up in his own mouth). Ideally, you’re supposed to build the Ark before the flood, not after the water is over your head and the giraffes are standing on your dead body. Reaction to Murdoch’s wishful thinking around the web from media CEOs, seasoned journos and editors has ranged from the overjoyed and self-congratulatory to the flippant and seriously amused, but I think it’s Sly Bailey, chief executive of the UK’s Trinity Mirror, who nails it the cleanest:

…while a “paid online model already exists for unique, high value and well-differentiated content”, she doubted “that it is possible for publishers to charge for general news content when the same content is given away for free by the BBC, Google News and others”.

“I don’t think this is about what Rupert Murdoch wants. It’s about what the consumer is prepared to pay for. And why would you pay when you can get the same thing somewhere else for free?”

Bloody good question, that, one that has been resoundingly answered by consumers over the past decade. It makes for a slow pitch over the plate for Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic:

This is closer to riding your horse at full speed into the bright daylight, bragging about how people need your horse and love seeing it for free, then complaining about all the free pictures being taken of your horse, then getting thrown from your horse and watching it run away with all its freeloading admirers. Then you wait about 10 years, sulk back to your barn, lock the door and demand that your horse return to its stall.

Reuters boss Chris Ahearn concurs and goes even further:

To start, yes the global economy is fairly grim and the cyclical aspects of our business are biting extremely hard in the face of the structural changes. But the Internet isn’t killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven’t been keeping up. Many leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting “resources” (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing and vertically curated views need to be meshed with horizontal read-around ones.

Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.

Exactly (he writes while listening to an MP3 ripped from a YouTube video of a film clip soundtrack). You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Why would you even want to, asks the Guardian:

We want to see journalism develop, not return to the days in which an elite minority acted as secular priests, telling people what they thought they ought to know.

Bottom line (for free, no less): great reporting will continue regardless of where Mr. Murdoch and his ilk tries to steer his papers and magazines, which appears to be back up the cliff for yet another long jump down.

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