In Defense of Murdoch

Hey all,

Maureen sent the following things to me and, because of tech difficulties, asked if I would post them on the class blog. Then I had even more tech difficulties and was unable to. But now it's all good once again. - Joel

First, a note from Maureen, which includes a note from her dad, to whom she sent the Jeff Jarvis article in which he criticized Murdoch:

So prompted by the discussion that we had in class about Rupert Murdoch,
I decided to ask my Dad's opinion on the subject, since he works for the
New York Post. I sent him the article by Jarvis and here's what he had
to say:

"It makes sense for Murdoch, and others, to keep their news content off
Google and other sites that collect and distribute proprietary content
without compensating the producer, because the websites like ours
are struggling to make money. What Google is doing is very much like
what Limewire and similar music file-sharers did: they took other
people's music without permission and gave it away, which infringed on
the rightful owners - the bands, the publishers - ability to sell their
work to paying customers.

The internet is a dicey marketplace. People who sell tangible products,
like amazon, can make money. Pornographers make lots of money. But news
sites, who have been giving their content away in an attempt to attract
advertisers, have not been profitable. Murdoch's plan is to charge a
subscription fee for a comprehensive News Corp web site that would
include content from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The
Times and Sunday Times of London, Fox News, and all the other News Corp
products. But, he can't do that if people can go to Google, for example,
and access for free the content he spends billions of dollars to
produce.

The is not old-fashioned thinking. This is the direction internet
publishing is taking today. If internet publishers cannot find a
business model that allows them to make money, they will stop putting
their info on the net."

Then my response:

Hey Maureen,

That's excellent that your dad responded to Jarvis's article. Please thank him for his response, which is really thoughtful. A lot of people would completely agree with him, and in many ways I do, too. The problem is that, now that readers have become accustomed to getting stuff for free online, there's a lot of resistance built up to the idea of suddenly having to pay for it. The strategy works for Murdoch at the WSJ, because subscribers are willing to pay for authority they feel only the Journal provides. Harder with other news sites, though, to get readers to be willing to pay for what they deem to be "just the day's news." The Post has its own voice and authority, obviously, but even when the New York Times tried to put a handful of their marquee columnists behind a pay wall, readers revolted, and people found ways to make the columns available on other sites anyway.

He's completely right that what's happening at Google is the print analogue to music file-sharing, and so there are probably some lessons to be learned there. One of them is that the corporate music industry is drastically smaller now than it was ten years ago, and individual bands and small labels are once again making money by touring—essentially giving their music away online and using that as a way to attract listeners to tours, rather than touring to get listeners to buy albums, which is a complete reversal of the model.

As Clay Shirky said, right now print is in the middle of change, we're at the moment of the printing press, which means we can see what's being lost but we can't yet see what the new landscape will look like. It may be that Murdoch is right, that NewsCorp is, collectively, authoritative enough that readers will pay to get through a door that allows them access to all its brands. Recent history suggests otherwise, though--that readers don't want to pay and that someone will find a way to make that info, or the most desired portions of it, available for free anyway.

It's a brutal time to be in publishing, though someone is going to figure out how to make money off Internet journalism. It just might not be all the same old players. (Which isn't to say that I think Murdoch is going broke any time soon; just that my instinct--which is certainly no more informed than your dad's--is that pretending the Internet isn't there is probably not the path, though maybe NewsCorp readers are loyal enough that it will work. As with all of these questions, who knows?)

Then this from Maureen:

Maureen: I found something on Gawker that talks about the Murdoch pay wall. They
actually agree with it.
http://gawker.com/5411780/the-coming-search-engine-media-wars