« BACK  |  PRINT

RS

MEMBER DIARY

Rupert Murdoch Leads, and I’m Glad

By: kowalski (Diary)  |  August 5th, 2009 at 06:37 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Well, it’s been years since anyone took the lead in the news/journalism/blogosphere space but Rupert Murdoch has finally drawn the line in the sand by announcing that News Corp. will charge for its news websites.

I agree with him, I think it’s been a long time in coming and is well overdue. The “free content” model of Internet news as it exists today is a path toward poverty, and even worse journalism and more insipid content.

I already pay for the WSJ and for years I’ve watched sites I value make an attempt to use advertising and donations to cover their financial bases, usually unsuccessfully. I’ve always wondered when people were going to realize that giving away content and work product was ultimately self-defeating in environment where you need intelligent people doing real work to produce a quality product.

Kudos to Murdoch and I hope more people in the blogosphere lose their strange obsession with working for free. It’s not just anti-capitalist, it’s a race to the bottom. What good are knowledge workers who can’t pay their bills?

It takes a mogul like Murdoch to really change the tone with a few words, and I’m glad he’s decided to do it. And if Redstate starts charging a subscription, I’d be one of the people who would happily pay, as I’ve said for years.

Tags: , ,
Get Alerts

COMMENTS

POSTING RULES  |  LOGIN TO COMMENT  |  REGISTER TODAY
  • http://socratesbox.blogspot.com Socrates

    And I will poison the well a bit: anyone who thinks information should be free doesn’t value his own information very much.

    • dave_in_atl

      It is not even about content being free. I mean look at Google it is making money hand over fist by “giving everything away.” Customers are paying for content indirectly by viewing ads, and every now and then buying something. In return companies are willing to pay websites for eyeballs. It is a win, win, win. Customers get their content for free, websites make money, and companies sell more product.

      If that is not capitalism I don’t know what is.

      Yes the internet is disruptive, and yes companies that used to make money may no longer make money. To stay on top one must learn to adapt to new market conditions. If you cannot adapt you die, again capitalism at its best.

      Personally though I feel that a news site throwing their content behind a pay wall is actually a bad idea, and in the long run is just going to decrease relevance of said site due to less visitors.

      • http://socratesbox.blogspot.com Socrates

        In fact, I’m a big proponent of free software, while Alex is not. He and I have been over it :-) . So I totally get it.

        But information has various levels of quality. If you want all of your news to be vetted by competing twitter hoards, that’s one thing. But there is a place for paid news organizations, and the advertising model doesn’t cover it.

        One problem is the Creative Commons issue. One popular variant of the Creative Commons license allows anyone to use, copy, and redistribute your work, as long as they give you credit (hat tip, link back, etc.). But there is no way to enforce it, particularly with raw information. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and it may as well have come from your competitors.

        The word is ‘and’.

      • Kowalski

        It’s not going into supporting free websites, that’s for damn sure. If people want to continue to have a zero-cost medium that has real actual costs in terms of people’s lives and livelihoods, let them continue.

        I’m not investing in or supporting anything that doesn’t include returns for investors. The days of getting news and other information for nothing based on the work of other people who are working for nothing has to come to an end if we’re going to have an economy with people who can actually maintain their standards of living.

  • Kowalski

    What’s really perverse about so many people on the Internet is that they will happily blog away about raising the minimum wage, building unions, and paying auto workers $30-60 an hour — but they’ll do it for nothing! They’ll actually expend their time and effort writing something that makes them impoverished.

    That kind of silly behavior has to stop. I have Democrat friends and Republican friends who are trying to make a living in the blogosphere space and frankly, they can’t. That’s because the large media organizations chose deliberately to go for eyeballs instead of real revenue. Well, it has to change. Otherwise it’s just a slightly better version of “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

  • http://jacksonianlawyer.wordpress.com Jacksonian Lawyer

    A subscription-based format will go a great distance in elminating the ever-reaching grasp of the Obama administration – the very administration that urges citizens to report/inform on those citizens voicing “criticisms.” It’s clear – ABC, NBC & CBS are all state-run media now. Kudos to Murdoch.