Sorry Rupert, we’re not paying for content
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New York, early years of the twentieth century and a bunch of rag traders notice that people will pay almost anything to watch these new kinematograph flicker thingies. They hire some halls and pretty soon they’ve got a chain of kinemas. At some point it becomes worth it to start making the fillums themselves. But Thomas Edison controls patents on the cameras, so the new film makers — Louis B Mayer, Sam Gelbfisk, the brothers Warner — send their crews out west to a Los Angeles suburb called Hollywoodland. From that moment on, the movie moguls attributed their decades of success to some innate sense of what the public wanted. It was all tchtokes of course — they had just got in at the ground floor. When TV came along in the 50s they didn’t have a clue what to do, and by the end of the decade half of the studios were broke. Are we seeing something of the same thing with Rupert Murdoch’s arsed-up relationship to the internet? Five years or so ago Murdoch thought that the internet was never going to threaten papers, then he suddenly rushed pell mell into it as a feed to papers, then three months ago someone showed him Google News, and now he’s talking about trying to corral content back with paid online subscriptions. Does the man actually have a clue what’s going on? Of course not. He’s a smart businessman, who made some astute early decisions — such as turning the boring trade union paper The Daily Herald into the page three stunna gotcha Sun in the 1960s — but in terms of wider analysis, he’s an obvious man who thinks obvious thoughts. Central to his idea that papers can suddenly claw back the material they’ve put out for free is the delusion that newspaper buying and reading is a static habit, unchanging beneath the flow of tech change. It’s not — the net has changed our relationship to writing, news and information utterly, and to think otherwise is to believe that the middle ages could have uninvented block printing and gone back to the monasteries. Paying for a physical newspaper is/was something you just did, even five years ago. Now, the idea that your morning’s news would come encased in a single source seems odd – and paying for straight news items on the web (as opposed to the excellent goulash of punch and pugilistic your reading now etc) seems absurd. Who reads a newspaper website, the way they used to read a paper? You flick round a dozen of them, take feeds, jump through hyperlinks and any site that wants to charge for info, better have stuff that people are actually willing to pay for — ie financial news, research articles, commodities stuff. The stuff we used to pay for — crash in Mildura leaves two dead, Footscray Rd bridge re-opens, blah blah — won’t cut it. Is that a crisis for news gathering? You bet. But to focus on that would be — to return to the print example — to declare that Gutenburg’s invention spelt trouble for the scroll-making industry. Murdoch and many others have got the times repeatedly wrong because what is happening is not the death of newsprint, but an effective crisis of mass intellectual property and copyright. Printing ultimately gave us the reformation and the enlightenment — whatever’s coming from this revolution is well out of Rupert’s ken. He never stopped being big — it’s just that the pictures got small, and transmitted on iPhones, while the papers pile up on pallets nearby. |
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15 Comments
It is not credible that we will be paying for the likes of the Daily Telegraph (that would be like paying to be smeared in manure) or even the Australian. The WSJ is being used as an example but it has little similarity to the ordinary type of newspapers.
WSJ readers kid themselves into believing that they are paying money in order to make money. There is little else in the News stable that would encourage that kind of belief.
Sharp, consise, insightful stuff Guy.
You’re da man.
Love the movie analogy. Rupert Murdoch is an old man playing in a yesterday’s ball game. However, such is his wealth the world could counter-turn twice and he wouldn’t even notice it.
Wonderful writing, as usual.
Sorry Guy but you have the Sun chronology wrong. The Daily Herald had been founded and run as a union mouthpiece and often news values were cast aside when some union heavy thought another story was more important and intervened.
It was in decline when Odhams bought it and relaunched it as The Sun, slightly smaller than the then-broadsheet Times and Telegraph but certainly not a tabloid in size or content.
I was proud to belong to a team which tackled serious issues and, for example, took up environmental causes long before they were fashionable and the Greens had even been conceived.
However although it sold more than a million copies daily it was judged unviable.
Then the Dirty Digger, as he was known in Fleet Street, bought the masthead and relaunched it as the trashy tabloid that still unfortunately survives.
Incidentally he lowered the whole tone of UK newspapers: the rival tabloid Daily Mirror had been edging towards more serious coverage, including explaining the background of news events with diagrams. When it began losing circulation to the Murdoch Sun it turned gutterwards to compete.
Dunno about that, people pay for the Telegraph now, and the rest of the papers in the country..why is you guys think it should be different on line? Surely work needs to be paid for? I’m assuming you believe in intellectual property as a basic right? Is this Crikey re-hashing the self serving argument about the death of newspapers, Guy I’m a little disappointed.
The genie can be put back in the bottle, there’s a user pay model that works, it just hasn’t been figured out yet.
PS there’s plenty of good reading in Australian newspapers, it’s very easy to bag them, as you constantly do, check out some of the dross in the US
If the BBC could get off their backside and come up with a paid subscription option that allowed us unwashed colonials access to their UK-only content, I would jump at it.
If The Australian was suddenly to become a paid site, it would drop off my radar quicker than Janet Albrechtson at an “Honesty in Journalism” seminar.
I’m confused Guy. I pay for content with Crikey …
Ken Benson, one reason the Daily Telegraph would never survive as a paid service is that the celebrity trash/gee this is weird stuff that is a big part of their content is done so much better, and for free, online.
The IP argument has some morality (and an awful lot of moralising) behind it but it has little salience in the marketplace. If you could obtain your baked beans for free you would and you would ignore the wails of misery from the baked beans manufacturers and their workers. The same applies in the world of information and the only difference is that it is a reality in that market but unfortunately it will never be a flatulent reality for the lovers of baked beans.
David Sanderson, comparing baked beans to journalism is about as valid as continually banging about the trashiness or not of Australian papers….not to your taste I can accept…but that they fundamentally poor I can’t. Talk about moralising, some of the contributors here do nothing but moralise, not to mention the Crikey writers…have a think about why they continually push the barrow that newspapers are in terminal decline…does it not suit the purposes of an on-line ‘news’ letter to do that?
As I said take a look at what’s dished up overseas, our papers are far superior, that’s why the situation is not the same here as in the US…
The circulation numbers from Fairfax suggest an extremely robust future for the printed word.
That must be why they have to give them away.
Ken, why is the comparison not valid? Your post asserts that it is not not gives no reasoning or explanation.
” …… he’s an obvious man who thinks obvious thoughts.”
a Rundle Gem.
I am sure this ‘entrepreneur’ like most of the population that think of him thus doesn’t know the real meaning of the word (easy to appreciate in the French).
Did you mean ‘tchotchke’, Guy? Even so, it doesn’t make much sense.
The only way a printed newspaper can hold its own against online content is to offer what is not available online, namely original material (scoops, insightful analysis, investigative journalism, etc) and the kind of attractive presentation that takes advantage of the printed form.
Yes yes pip pip…down with Rupert and paid-for content. The WSJ? Pleeeze! It would be like paying for subscription political comment/opinion glorified double you sheet.
All terribly web 0.5, Crikey - couldn’t agree more.
Yes, Rupert’s days are numbered, but will the blogoshere replace him with someone sane? It’s unlikely that one hyper-greedy industrialist will be replaced by a collective of noble digitalists. Our culture is still based on abstracted abuse and exploitation of finite resources stolen from traditional communities and non-human nature. The pathologies of industrial civilisation don’t immaterialise with digital technology, they might however for a short time just look more virtuous.