Betting against Rupert Murdoch is usually a bad bet. The media mogul, well known conservative and head of Newscorp, which owns, among many things the Wall Street Journal and the FOX News Channel , is making a huge bet on internet news. He wants to charge for it. The media industry is dying. Newspaper subscriptions are going down by the day. More and more people get their news online, and the ones who don’t are dying by the day. On a typical day I read 15 political articles, and several are from Newscorp owned papers.
The fact is, the horse is out of the barn. Newspapers should have never had their content online for free. Now that it is, we expect it to be that way. The old business model is broken. The idea of paying for news just seems archaic. I love newspapers more than most my age, and I love good reporting. That said, people won’t pay for a slightly better product in order to have slightly better reports. Sure, I will miss some of the great writing in the WSJ, but I can still sleep at night reading Bloomberg. If Bloomberg decides to start charging, I will read more off TheStreet.com and so on.
For online media to make money, it must figure out a different business model than in the past. Charging the reader just won’t work. Most people are trying some kind of online advertising model, and that seems to be the logical choice. Still, that may not be the right one. For sure though, it won’t be by paying for content in a free content world.
