Comments on: Rupert the Sun King’s moral posture takes on a slouch

By: jules

jules — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:30:56 +0000

From the time this story was published I was, and remain, suspicious of Murdoch’s motives in pushing the “theft” line with regard to published content. I saw his comments as his method of stirring up support for pay for content internet because he lost a lot of money on advertising. I may be niaeve here but that is what I was reading in the papers. There are a lot of “little people” who could lose out on their enjoyment of the internet if he gets his way. I used to spend a fortune on papers while I was working - 7 days a week a paper. When I retired I invested in a good computer and enjoyed reading my “dailies” electronically. I’m sure there are many, many more people just like me who not only enjoy reading their dailies on the computer, but also enjoy the blogging on current affairs issues. It keeps my grey matter from retiring, my blind touch typing skills and speed are kept going on the blogs and emails and I keep my hand in on what is happening around the place: all of which I enjoy immensely. I would hate to see this end and fervently hope that it doesn’t. I’ll be watching this space with great interest.

By: RV

RV — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:35:02 +0000

Yes - has the old goat finally lost it, or is there something devilish afoot?

It’ll be interesting.

By: alan.jones

alan.jones — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:51:30 +0000

My thoughts are a bit long for a comment so I've written a blog post but I think what Rupert's hoping to do is (a) shock all the news publishers into a 'coalition-of-the-willing-to-charge-for-news'; and (b) hoping to pressure the search giants into sharing with him some of the ad revenue they make from the search result pages his news stories appear on. I don't see either happening. News needs search more than search needs news, and even if the commercial news publishers stopped hating each other for long enough to cartel-ize, the search engines would do just as well by limiting their search results to publicly-owned news publishers.

By: Rowan

Rowan — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:20:40 +0000

@STEPHEN MARTIN, Google/Yahoo/etc do a lot more for news sites than the news sites do for them. If the news sites didn’t have search engines driving traffic towards them then they would receive far less traffic and as a result far less revenue from ads on the news sites.

That is the primary reason why news sites don’t block search engines from indexing their content.

@KEN BENSON, yes, journalists and media companies need to make money but what Murdoch is doing at the moment is phony posturing. He is saying on the one hand that the search engines and news aggregator’s are stealing his content and on the other hand he’s being passed a solution that will prevent this stealing, but he’s ignoring it.

Why is he ignoring the solution that would literally take ONE person TWO minutes to implement?

If he added a robots.txt file to his site his phony problems would be fixed.

I sincerely hope that Murdoch does block search engines from indexing his sites and that he puts a pay wall between millions of Internet users and his content. Rest assured that not all media companies will be so foolish as to cut their own legs off and that the millions of users who are deprived of Rupert’s content will flock to the remaining news sites with free content.

…and guess where the advertiser’s will flock?

Not behind a pay wall, that’s for sure.

By: Ken Benson

Ken Benson — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:04:25 +0000

Margaret isn’t the point that the public are already paying for the ABC on-line, there’s no outcry about that? Journalists need to be paid, media companies need to make money and bloggers aren’t news

By: stephen martin

stephen martin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 04:31:58 +0000

Margaret Simons article makes sense to me; maybe the news media would be more appreciative of Google and Yahoo if they were to share in the advertising revenue generated on Google’s and others web pages.

By: Quentin Evans

Quentin Evans — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 04:10:20 +0000

There is however a positive side to Rupert’s desires. If columnists like Piers Akerman were locked behind a pay wall. Would his coterie of sycophants pay to agree with his opinions ? Would the general public actually subscribe to the Daily Telegraph? Imagine an internet where the main free news was on the ABC site. I think that it could be wonderfully ironical. As long as the ABC doesn’t get tempted.