The attempt by dear old Rupe to make the punters pay for access to news continues, as does the demonisation of aggregators and linkers around the Web. How News International is going to make its content so unique as to make folks willingly pay for it is a mystery: as Nick Davies has explained in Flat Earth News, there is little to differentiate between a variety of presenters of what is in effect the same news.
Murdoch himself has been at the forefront of cutting costs by cutting down on the numbers of journalists. Unless he is going to spend more, in order to give his content a uniqueness and quality not available elsewhere, he’s on a hiding to nothing.
Moreover, the whole idea of simply walling up his empire behind a pay barrier misunderstands the way the Web works. This has been brought home in typically forthright style by Arianna Huffington, in this post. I commend it to anyone not yet persuaded of Murdoch’s folly.
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