Rupert Murdoch, media titan whose News Corp empire includes The Times, The Sun, and many other dailies, announced last week that his organization was going to take the strategic step of blocking news content from the websites of his various newspapers such that they do not appear on Google Search.
Since then, he has been derided by the online community, including the founders of Twitter and LinkedIn, for what they perceive to be his short sighted approach to the “open” internet community. I’m not so sure his approach is so wrong for the following reasons:
1) Those making the most noise are those that stand to lose the most from the removal of credible news sources. The majority of tweets are news headlines, endlessly retweeted, and not generating a dime of income for the source.
2) Similarly, News Corp doesn’t stand to lose any money in the near term. Their subscribers still have access to their content and I doubt that their income from online advertising is high enough to be of significance.
3) Those online news parasites have little loyalty and will switch from News Corp to Fox to whoever gives them free info. If all news channels start to charge, then this will get harder and harder, effectively marginalizing sites like Twitter, Youtube, etc…that are almost dependent on them to keep their followers.
4) This brings us to a key point. If other media organizations follow suite and bar their content from Google searches, and open their sites only to subscribers, then we might really see a fundamental change in the nature of the industry. I’m not saying these media giants will ultimately win the day, but at the very least, innovative models to deliver credible news content might start to spring up.
I’m neither for nor against this move as I get my news in various ways (usually paid). However, those that draw similarities between the music industry and the news industry are sadly misinformed. The music industry was riding upon a high margin business and what iTunes did was merely to make it more accessible to the layman. The sheer volume of incremental sales justified the move towards a low price, high volume model.
News on the other hand, is an inherently low margin business. How much do you pay for that daily? $0.75? How much lower do you think this can go? Some newspapers are already free, relying on advertising to fund their operations. Maybe this is the model of the future. The weakness of these papers is usually in their commentary and analysis…but nowadays, everyone wants to be a critic or commentator so the days of commentators like William Safire are probably over.
Actually, I think that the future lies not in News Corp sized conglomerates but in large numbers of specialist newspapers/sites, most of whom may consist of a single person acting as reporter, copywriter and editor. Aggregators can then subscribe to them to form the columns in a more traditional newspaper or e-zine. Its happening already….don’t we have popular blogs that we subscribe to??
