Written by Jonathan Este

Murdoch as Machiavelli – it’s not the first time this trope has reared its head in the commentariat and I’ll bet your bottom dollar it won’t be the last.

The latest theory is that Murdoch’s enthusiasm for charging for content (let’s discard “pay wall” as misleading) is all about promoting his print products. He spent $1.3 billion a couple of year ago on three “cathedrals of print” (modern, worker-free printing presses) and all the bluster about having to charge for content online is a rearguard action to encourage more people to read the “dead-tree” option.

I really don’t buy this. I think Murdoch is merely reacting to the same social and market forces that are driving every other newspaper publisher in the developed world to consider the same thing: people are increasingly moving online, a move that is particularly marked among younger consumers.

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Written by Jonathan Este

In his regular column for MediaGuardian, Jeff Jarvis rubbishes Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that News Corporation intends to charge for its online news content, quoting Vivian Schiller, now of National Public Radio, formerly of the New York Times, saying charging for content is doomed to failure – she should know, she’s had close-up experience of one of those failures.

New York Times tried to hive off its comment and stick it behind a crude pay wall called TimesSelect. It was a dramatic albatross: according to Paid Content.org the subscription service had only 227,000 paid subscribers and cost the Times dearly in terms of advertising revenue from all those eyes it locked out.

At the time Schiller said: “This is what is really important—it did work. It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

As compared to not having a pay wall, she might have added. Here’s what she told Newsweek recently:

“I am a staunch believer that people will not in large numbers pay for news content online. It’s almost like there’s mass delusion going on in the industry—They’re saying we really really need it, that we didn’t put up a pay wall 15 years ago, so let’s do it now. In other words, they think that wanting it so badly will automatically actually change the behavior of the audience. The world doesn’t work that way. Frankly, if all the news organizations locked pinkies, and said we’re all going to put up a big fat pay wall, you know what, more traffic for us [NPR]. News is a commodity; I’m sorry to say.”

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Written by Jonathan Este

ONE thing we regularly bash on about is that news executives must remember that their future is intimately bound up with that of their staff.

To put it another way: a media company’s greatest asset is its journalists.

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Written by Christopher Warren

Let’s parse a few recent statements from News Limited executives in light of what the company appears to be actually doing as it fights to remodel itself to face a digital future. It makes for an interesting exercise.

The latest orthodoxy, in line with Rupert Murdoch’s assertion that people will have to pay for news content online, is that people will gladly hand over their money for news content that is “original, exclusive, has the authority and is relevant to [their] audiences”.

It’s hard to argue against the assertion that, in order to survive, news organisations will have to find a way of making their product pay for itself online. At the moment this appears to be a long way away, but that’s another argument.

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