Murdoch's web policy

[marksi]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8351331.stm

Rupert Murdoch has said he will try to block Google from using news content from his companies.
The billionaire told Sky News Australia he will explore ways to remove stories from Google's search indexes, including Google News.
Mr Murdoch's News Corp had previously said it would start charging online customers across all its websites.
He believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results.
"There's a doctrine called 'fair use', which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether," Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. "But we'll take that slowly."
Mr Murdoch announced earlier this year that the websites of his news websites would begin charging for access.
The target had been for all its sites to charge by June next year, but indications are that this is now unlikely.
News Corp owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US.
Newspapers across the world are considering the best way to make money from the internet, particularly in a time of falling advertising revenues.
The risk is that charges may alienate readers who have become used to free content and deter advertisers.

Is there sound business sense in this old man's arguments, or is he at least a generation away from reality?

And if you were running Google, would you remove all Murdoch websites from your index?

[Dr Lobster*]

i think he is massively overvaluing his news.

i check a variety of websites for my daily dose of news, including timesonline. but would i pay to check it each day? no way. would i find a way to get access to timesonline content without paying? no. i'd just find somewhere else, and i think that's what most people would do too.

[cat]

If you take his argument to (I think) it's logical conclusion, he's saying "anything that is reported in the Times/Sun/WSJ can only be reported in the Times/Sun/WSJ".

So if the Times were to get an exclusive about, say, troops numbers in Afghanistan; or the Sun were to get an exclusive about voting figures on X Factor; nobody would know about these stories unless they read the Times or the Sun. Any reprinting of the articles or any article saying "Bob Smith told the Times newspaper..." would be a court case.

Perhaps I am stretching it to an extreme level but it sounds utterly ridiculous to me.

[Pete]

Indeed, I think it was the Guardian who pointed out that if the Telegraph had a pay wall during expenses all you'd have to do is wait an hour or two until all the other papers had their "the Telegraph reports that" stories up.

Either he's senile or so bitter over myspace going downhill he's decided all the internets are evil.

[marksi]

I think that he's either gone mad or simply does not understand the internet. Do you think maybe he's never actually used it? He seems to think that people will - without the help of search engines or aggregators - go directly to his news sites for their information, having already decided that they'd hand over money to do this.

I do not believe that will happen.

I have this vision of him dictating policies like this at board meetings and over-ruling everyone else in the room.

[cdd]

I don't think he's entirely mad. If other major outlets follow suit, you'll have two choices: pay for your news, or go for dodgy unverified sites.

People might not care which newspaper they read, but they do want to get their news from a quality source.

That's one of the reasons the public do not object to paying the license fee (although that's a whole differnet story...).

[marksi]

That's one of the reasons the public do not object to paying the license fee (although that's a whole differnet story...).

I must see if I can get the differnet. But on the other hand I'm not that bothered. Indiffernet, you could say.

[timgraham]

All his editors and assorted lackeys are going to have a tough time translating his incoherent ramblings into actual practice. It doesn't actually sound as though they've got any plan at all, at a time when everyone's paying close attention to what they'll be doing next.

At first it seemed as though they wanted to charge for only premium content whereas now he wants us to pay for *everything*, which is never going to work when you've got sites like this and this competing directly with his own businesses.

I don't buy the theory that theirs is a desperate empire in decline (which is what the head of the ABC said in a speech here in direct response to Lachlan Murdoch's comments) but I don't really see how they're going to make it work.

[Chie]

If you can afford to pay 90p every day for a newspaper then you can afford to pay for a £27 p/m subscription to a news website instead. No?

I don't know why some people find this so surprising. If, as has been predicted for a few years now, newspaper sales keep dwindling away because people are getting their news from the internet instead, then of course we're going to have to start paying for it. You're only transfering your spend away from one format to another - I don't see what the big deal is? Why does it pain a lot of people so much to think they might actually have to *pay* for a service they use on the internet?

Sure, if you want the basics then go to the BBC, but that's all you'll get. Murdoch isn't stupid, he knows you can't compete with free -- if the quality is the same. But if there's an alternative which is better (in their perception) than the free one, people will be willing to pay for it.

Everyone could get their news from free newspapers like The Metro or London Lite if they wanted to, but they don't. The majority buy a paper.

Personally I find the quantity and quality of information in newspaper articles to be a lot more substantial than what I find on the BBC News website, and that's what makes newspapers or their online equivalent worth paying for. The BBC isn't supposed to compete with commercial because that isn't the point of the BBC, so there's no danger of BBC News making a concerted effort to match the quality/quantity of commercial websites, at least not in the immediate future. There's simply no competition between the two.

People are loyal to their papers, and as they all move away from buying papers to using the internet, they'll become loyal to their news websites, too.

[timgraham]

Paying for 'basic news' like Murdoch seems to want to do now isn't going to work - in my opinion the money lies in offering extra products and services, like cross-promotional deals with pay TV services, airline upgrades, that kind of thing. A columnist for the Australian here suggested the same thing - but Uncle Rupert has explicitly shot that one down:

And fascinatingly, when Sky News' David Speers put to Murdoch precisely the sort of plan that Mark Day seemed to be talking about three weeks ago, the great man was having none of it.

"David Speers: You can provide basic news free, analysis and commentary you can pay for, and then tailor, you know have a third tier where you tailor premium news content for the interests that a particular user would have, is this the sort of...

Rupert Murdoch: Oh we'd put the whole lot together we wouldn't try and distinguish because we think there's also, in a newspaper, well what we call a newspaper today, a news service, there's a thing called editorial judgment, there's a thing called quality of writing, quality of reporting...

— Sky News, 'The Interview' with David Speers, 7th November, 2009"

The ABC here had quite a good dissection of that interview - there had an entire episode dedicated to it a few weeks ago, as well as a look at Murdoch's interview last night.

I get the impression that he's making up these plans on the run. It's totally incoherent at the moment. Although knowing Rupert Murdoch it really doesn't feel quite right to write him off straight away.

[cdd]

Sure, if you want the basics then go to the BBC, but that's all you'll get. Murdoch isn't stupid, he knows you can't compete with free -- if the quality is the same.

I made this point above but it bears repeating, BBC News isn't free. I think it's a great example of where people ARE willing to pay for their news.