Further to my post earlier this week about the announcement by Rupert Murdoch that News Corp. would charge for access to its news websites, go to this link at Crikey.com to listen to the full conference call. This provides a more complete context.
This is the media story of the week with more than 4,500 stories online and 10,000 blog posts. It has sparked a huge debate as to whether people will pay for content. The only way publishers will find the answer is if more of them throw up models. The current approach clearly has financial challenges for them, something had to change.
The ABC yesterday published an excellent report on the charge or die imperative newspaper publishers are being told they face.
Personally, at this stage I don’t see myself paying for online news. But who knows? As we found with iTunes, the distribution channel (iPod, iPhone) is the key.
It might be hard for the gen y’s (seeing they get credit cards given to them for nothing and think everything’s free).
But like iTunes I like to pay for it seeing it goes to the artist, paying for quality journalism will happen I believe – Who works for nothing?
Rupert will figure it out, never underestimate a man who likes chasing rabbits!(from his biography- William Shawcross)
Will be interesting to see how journalism will look in, say, 10 year’s time, when possibly every journalist will be freelance and self-employed.