News Corp to charge for all news websites | Hacker News Reader

News Corp to charge for all news websites

businessspectator.com.au

15 pointswinanga21 comments

I'm not going to suggest that pay walls are the best option for the newspapers. They probably aren't.

However, I do hope that, over time, people get more used to paying for things online. I think that a culture of paying for goods and services will promote a higher level of quality on the web.

TV is a great example. The ad-supported networks tend to milk TV shows for money long past their prime, while stations like HBO can insist on higher quality programming because that's what their customers pay for. I would bet that if there were a news network that didn't rely on advertising, it wouldn't be nearly as sensationalistic as the ad-supported ones and you wouldn't hear lines like, "a common household substance that can kill you on contact... tune in at 11."

Pay walls may turn out to be bad for the ailing newspapers, but I think it would be good for the web, in the long term.

TV is a bad example. Premium channels have a ton of money from their subscriptions, so they have a ton of money to invest into new programming. Take HBO for example, the Band of Brothers 10 episode series cost $125 million to make. The Pacific miniseries, has a budget of $250 million. Regular channels simply don't have the $$$ to match up. So while HBO has truly epic shows, regular channels are stuck doing cop shows, since they are cheap to make.

News on the other hand is static. The paid services aren't going to report better news. They aren't going to report more news. Nothing will change in how they are run, its just a way for them to start charging for content that is free elsewhere.

It's become a cliche, but I sincerely believe that the lack of a decent micropayment system sabotaged any chance of that for-pay culture existing on the internet and prevented it from becoming the economic engine we once envisioned.

However, such phenomenal social progress has been made, and could only have been made, in that commercial vacuum, and there is more to come. It's not worth giving that up for the quick fix of a consumerized internet.

You mean micropayment for the Web. The Internet is fine and making a lot of cash for everyone involved. It's quite the economic engine.

This is so dumb I double-checked to make sure this article wasn't a hoax.

Here's the situation: news-gathering companies have looked at the economics of the situation and realized that either people need to start paying for news, or 95% of news-gathering companies will die.

They've taken this to mean "and so people will inevitably start paying for content", but the actual conclusion should be "inevitably 95% of news gathering companies will die".

Radically wider distribution via the Internet has rendered the hugely redundant newspaper business (one newspaper for every town? Really?) obsolete. Even video producers are not immune (how many live news feeds do I need, exactly? 20? 10?).

Murdoch and co. are just dinosaurs refusing to acknowledge that the light in the sky is a comet.

The real silly thing is that there is a market for in-depth news analysis. The problem is that they've chosen not to serve this market, and as they race to the bottom they only now realize that they can't compete with 6 billion potential eyewitness reporters working for free.

They gambled and lost.

Of course, just like the car companies I somehow get the feeling that somehow I'll have to pay for their strategic mistakes.

Actually, you don't quite have it right.

You can be perfectly solvent (and even profitable) as a news company without charging for access to your content. The problem most such companies are facing is that they think basic laws of economics shouldn't apply to them.

The entire network of printing presses, press operators, print designers, distributors, delivery people -- that's all overhead. And now it's possible to be a news organization without that overhead. Thus, competitors can deliver the "product" with less overhead than the established companies, and hence at a lower price. Thus, companies which keep all that overhead will be driven out of business. The companies which throw all that stuff overboard will have a chance of staying competitive (and thus staying in business).

"Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content, is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting," Mr Murdoch said.

I quite agree - but what does that have to do with News Corp?

Boom boom!

Does anyone else foresee a move towards news where news is provided (via blogs, commentary, and (I'm sad to say) even tweets) by domain specialists? Programmers talking about the new Windows, investors talking about new mergers, etc.?

Does that not sound like an improvement?

I say let the news dinosaurs do whatever they want, I stopped paying attention to them for my news a long time ago anyway. People always have been and always will be excited to talk about what's important to them, even for free.

(I'll call it now, News 2.0 will be a buzzword soon, and that'll suck)

In my dreamworld the changing economics of the news industry, and newspapers in particular, would cause media outlets to spend less space covering extremely low-bar "entertainment" stories, less time regurgitating stories without adding anything of value, and basically stop the unquestioning reporting of what some spokesperson, official or otherwise, wishes to appear in print.

The outlets that will survive, and probably even thrive, are those that provide indepth, insightful and investigative coverage into the events of the world. (As a bonus - these are the types of articles that ARE copyrightable!).

I mean why would I pay to read about celebrity reactions to Paula leaving American Idol* when I can go to one of a zillion other sites and read basically the same story for free?

(* This is currently on the front page of washingtonpost.com, I kid you not)

They claim that the freely-available news sources are cannibalizing their ability to provide good journalism, but I find the free sources to be better than the sources considering charging online traffic. News aggregators, blogs, etc... I use them all the time. New York Times? Maybe once in a while, but they're often biased and overdramatic.

So where do you think the news aggregators are aggregating their news from?

I realize that somewhere somebody has to be doing the initial reporting, and that person needs to be paid, but with the amount of blogs and social networking that spreads news, I think it'll take a long time before a news aggregator can't supply a steady stream of decent news.

All I'm saying is that if that ever does become unreliable, then I would gladly pay for a service. But right now, the services that are considering charging aren't offering anything unique (with the exception of say, Wall Street Journal, that kind of thing (niche markets, a need for super reliability, etc...)

New York Times isn't owned by News Corp, New York Post is.

Incidentally, nytimes.com is the second most submitted domain on HN (http://top.searchyc.com/domains)

"nytimes.com is the second most submitted domain on HN" -- perhaps, but the sample (HN audience) is remarkably different from the population in general.

Everything? I can't see them charging for The Sun and the News of the World in the UK.

and people stopped reading their lies and the world became a better place.

This just in...NewsCorp reports massive decreases in web traffic. Film at 11.

Eyeballs and traffic != money. They're going for more revenue at the expense of "shipping" less "units".

And if they pull it off every other site is going to follow suit.

So this is what, FoxNews.com? Nobody that knows how to read or use a computer cares what Fox thinks, so this is not really a major loss.

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