by RogueTrooper
Fri May 8th, 2009 at 07:52:22 AM EST
Is Rupert Murdoch losing it?
I guess there was more important news this morning - Pakistan, the American banks - but it was Rupert Murdoch who caught my attention. I was stunned to read Andy Clark's dispatch in the Guardian this morning about Murdoch planning on charging for access to his properties on the internet.
Look, Rupe usually knows what he's doing. But this really flies in the face of common sense. He argues that the Wall Street Journal's experience proves that one can successfully charge readers for internet access to one's newspapers.
But does it? The Journal and the Financial Times, are kind of sui generis. They're financial newspapers, read by a global financial elite. You can charge global financial elites to read a tailored product of financial news.
But can you do the same with regular readers, to get them to read general-interest news? The universal experience has been that you can't.
The New York Times tried it and got hammered. It charged for so-called "Times Select" content - most prominently the paper's famous opinion columnists like Paul Krugman and David Brooks - for a little while, hoping to crowbar $50 a year out of saps like me.
It worked in my case, but there was a general hue and cry against it (not least from the columnists themselves). The paper quit charging for this premium content, and the whole experiment was chalked up a disaster.
And now Rupert thinks general readers who refused to pay for the quality New York Times are going pay for the proletarian New York Post? And the Sun and the News of the World? And for that matter the Times (your Times). If people didn't pay for our Times (the New York one - let's face it, an immeasurably better newspaper these days, such that there's utterly no comparison anymore between the two), why will they pay for yours? I just don't see it.
Neither do I, actually. Also, how much are online advertisers going to pay for their adverts the eyeballs can't see their adverts. I was under the assumption that newspapers made their real money from classified adverts not punters paying for their product.
What will the good people pay for?
The Post has the most famous newspaper gossip page in America, Page Six. It started as, well, a page in the newspaper, and actually used to be on page six. Now it's an industry. It runs to three or four pages in the paper most days, has been moved back to page 12 or so while retaining its brand name. There's also a weekend supplement magazine under the brand, and I think there's some kind of TV deal.
It's huge. Movers and shakers in New York and Hollywood (but Washington not so much) read it religiously.
But will they still read it if they have to pay for it? With Gawker and Perez Hilton and TMZ out there? I think some will. I'm not sure tens of thousands will.
Same with sports. The Post's sports pages are terrific. But they don't strike me as being quite so terrific that people will forego several roughly-as-good free alternatives.
He is going to struggle against free.
Hey, if Murdoch's right, he might introduce the rest of the world to the model that can save the newspaper once and for all. That'd be something to celebrate. Or it could be that we're getting to the end of the Murdoch era. In that case, I wouldn't cry.
Sometimes
Ozymandias is something to wish for.
