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Monday, 12 October 2009

What Murdoch thinks of the media

The latest piece of measured media commentary from Rupert Murdoch:

“The Philistine phase of the digital age is almost over. The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph.”

For analysis of this speech to the World Media Summit in Beijing overnight, here are a number of sources:

Murdoch Urges China to Open Up to Media says The Wall Street Journal

Murdoch: Time for search engines to pay says The Christian Science Monitor

Murdoch will pay for the end of free news says The Independent

Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content. So Why Doesn’t He Stop Them? asks Newsweek

Murdoch Scores “Kleptomaniac” News Sites, Calls to Make Them Pay says The Village Voice

Internet’s philistine phase almost over, says Murdoch is how the ABC’s AM saw it.

Murdoch: Media should ‘adapt and adopt’ amid challenge is the China Daily version.

The Australian pitched the issue forward: Scott to hit back on criticism of ABC’s internet space.

And here’s the full text from the News Corp site.

That’s not stealing, Rupert, that’s just a little village of information right there.

One Comment

  1. jeebus
    Posted Tuesday, 13 October 2009 at 1:50 pm | Permalink

    Murdoch is losing the game, and wants to change the rules. It’s an admission of his personal failure to both ‘adopt and adapt’ to the changing paradigms of information distribution in the digital age.

    This is evidenced by comments he has made in contempt of the Internet, and in lashing out at providers of high quality free content like the BBC and ABC. There is also a tinge of bitterness, which can probably be attributed to his purchase of Myspace at the peak of its popularity, only to see it dethroned shortly afterward by Facebook.

    Media barons attempted to create an Internet of gated pastures back in the days of Compuserve and AOL. Capitalism voted, and it chose a free world wide web instead. There are plenty of avenues for making money on the Internet. Murdoch just needs to use his business acumen and take some risks to find them.