Hello.

Let’s just jump in, shall we?

Rupert Murdoch wants to begin charging people for online content across all of his newspapers.

I say have at it. I will miss The Sun, but hey, there still a whole slew of mud-slinging sites out there that won’t make me pay to read about Katie Price. I don’t read The Wall Street Journal, why bother when I have Bloomberg, Reuters and The Smoking Gun? Those sites provide links to News  all over the world. I can get content specific information all day by clicking through them. Readers don’t need Murdoch’s papers, online or print.

Murdoch has an overblown sense of importance. And, like many others in the dying Print Journalism sector, he has completely ignored the group that spreads news the fastest.

No, not Iranian twitter junkies.

Bloggers.

If it’s even slightly news worthy or gossipy , the Bloggers will have it up and running in minutes. Twenty minutes later The Huffington Post will have the full article. With pictures and eyewitness accounts. New memes are being created constantly and they cycle through the Internet very quickly. Sure one could shut blogsites down but…  Attempting to silence bloggers has never worked out well for mainstream media. Why should they want to when they can steal content from bloggers who rarely complain? Oh yes, they do. They’ve done it to me. I’ve read my own words, without credit,  several times on mainstream news sites. I have heard from other bloggers who have the same problem.  We mostly ignore it, as it’s kind of flattering in a left handed way.

The issue here is whether the average joe will pay to read the news online?

I think for highly specialize content, maybe.  But then those papers would be reduced to industry specific information causing their readership to dwindle.

Yet, for general News? No. I don’t think people will pay.  Other online papers can follow the lead of the man whose papers are under investigation for criminal phone hacking, (coughworldnewscorpcough), but there are to0 many sites that will let us in to wander about for free. Also, there are many back doors into different papers. News aggregators would be the bane of the paying sites existence. Let’s not forget about the group that drives the Internet. The online advertisers. Online advertisers flock to the sites that have the most readers. If one is required to pay for content, the readership will shrink, causing advertisers to look elsewhere.

Murdoch can force people to pay, but he can’t force them to read his sites.

The News industry is discovering what the Music industry has been dealing with for years, people now have choices.  We are not bound to accept content based on what the Industry wants to give us. News, like music, will now be fully driven by demand.  If we like what you have to offer, we might pay for it. But probably not. Mostly we will wait for our aggregator to pick it up from another site or have it e-mailed to us by relatives.  Consumers no longer have to wait to be told what they like or which news groups they get their content from. They can choose for themselves. And very few people will choose to pay for something they can get for free elsewhere.

And for greedy, unscrupulous executives like Murdoch, that is a scary proposition.

Dogwoman