News Limited could be a fortnight away from locking up some of its websites as part of a brave new world of paid web content.
Paid news content
What’s Murdoch got to lose?
Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper is hemorrhaging about £1.5 million a week — so while erecting an online paywall may seem risky, he has nothing to lose and everything to gain, says media consultant Philip M. Stone.
Bartholomeusz: Murdoch isn’t building a wall — he’s building a fortress
News Corp has decided has decided on a very thick and crude pay-wall model for its UK paper The Times, says Stephen Bartholomeusz: no bundling, no micro-payments, no tiered access. It’s all or nothing with Rupe.
Why Murdoch’s paywall may not be so mad
If The Australian follows the recently revealed online paywall model for the UK’s Times, it will only need 50,000-odd subscribers to make it worthwhile, according to Tim Burrowes’ maths.
The Oz: We’re ready for our iPad, Mr Jobs
The Australian says it will be “among the first newspapers to offer an iPad edition”. It isn’t naming a price — but there will be one — but ominously notes that its sister paper, the WSJ, is charging AU$19.80 a month.
Google: How can newspapers survive? Ditch the “papers” bit
Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian offers some advice to newspaper publishers: paywalls won’t cure your financial woes — going big online will. Forget costly printed news: news outlets must go 100% online to survive.
Crikey Says: Rupert says content is king. It’s a clothes call
Rupert Murdoch has declared that “Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic”. Speaking of “emporers”…
Paywall FAIL: Newsday has 35 subscribers
In ominous news for the NYT and News Corp, it has been revealed that newsday.com has only secured 35 subscribers since the paper put up a paywall. The account of how the figure came out is gold.
Beecher: NYT to join the paywall brigade
The New York Times will introduce a charge for readers to use its website next year, heralding the most important development so far in the agonising who-will-pay-for-quality-journalism debate. The world of free journalism will never be the same.
Crikey Wrap: Moving with the NY Times
The NY Times has announced that it will resurrect a paywall for its online content, sending media geeks and commentators’ fingers flying over whether it will work and What It All Means. Crikey intern Flint Duxfield takes a look at what they’re saying.
NY Times reveals its paywall plans
The New York Times unveils its plans for the future of NYTimes.com: readers will get a flat number of free articles per month before having to pay.
rumour 
New York Times to go paywall
New York magazine claims the New York Times is soon to announce that it will start charging readers for access to its website, adopting a “metered system” (ie x number of articles free per day, pay for the rest) akin to that of the Financial Times.
Will Aussies pay for Murdoch’s news?
It’s going to be the media issue of the new decade: whether or not Rupert Murdoch can succeed in his plans to persuade newspaper readers to pay for content online. New research doesn’t look promising.
Ninemsn nails its colours to the mast: information should be free
Ninemsn news executive producer Hal Crawford has written a distinctly bolshie blog post arguing that Rupert Murdoch’s paywall push is a threat to freedom, reports Margaret Simons. Given it’s the most popular news website in the country, that’s no small thing.
Variety goes paywall
There goes another one: entertainment industry bible Variety is putting up a paywall tomorrow. It’s an icon of the industry, but with a $248-a-year subscription fee, its real cachet will be put to the test.
must read 
Google: How we can save newspapers
Frustrated newspaper executives need to stop blaming Google for their woes, writes the company’s CEO Eric Schmidt: Google News provides their sites with billions of clicks every month — and it wants to work with them to build bigger audiences and make more money.
The sites already making paywalls work
With all the huffing and puffing over Murdoch’s plan to paywall his News Corp sites, you’d think no-one had ever actually done it before. But there are plenty of sites on the Web already making paywalls work for them. We can think of at least one…
Google limits access to free news
Google News has announced it will allow online news sites to limit the number of articles readers can view free through Google News searches to five a day with its “First Click Free” program. Is the search giant selling out to The Man?
Murdoch lieutenant: “Free costs too much”
The CEO of News Corp publisher Dow Jones, Les Hinton, has — surprise, surprise — come out in defence of the company’s move to paywall all its content, denouncing the “false gospel of the web”: “We were promised that eyeballs meant advertising, clicks meant cash”.
In defence of paywalls
We can’t go on pretending that quality online journalism costs nothing, says journalism professor Tim Luckhurst. Thousands of journalists have already lost their jobs — paywalls are the industry’s only hope to restore some sanity.
News Ltd moves into online gaming
News Ltd has launched a “pay-to-play” trivia game on its Daily Telegraph website in the company’s latest endeavour to monetise more of its online real estate.
Rival publishers unite to create iTunes for magazines — but who’s buying?
Magazine publishers Hearst, Time Inc and Conde Nast are joining forces to create an “iTunes for magazines” — a online storefront for digital versions of their titles and articles. But they can’t sell a product that’s already free… are those paywalls we can see looming on the horizon?
What will it take to get people paying for online news?
There’s movement at the station: Rupe is dumping Google, Journalism Online has 1200 publishers on-board, and Time is creating an iTunes for magazine articles. What’s next on the path to making paywalls prosperous?
More publishers join Murdoch’s War on Google
Publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are planning to de-index their news articles from Google, emulating Rupert Murdoch’s plans to cut the search off from News Corp content.
Murdoch puts a gun to Google’s head, Microsoft helps pull the trigger
Rupert Murdoch has been threatening to pull all News Corp content from Google, and Microsoft is willing to pay him to do it. But Bing can’t buy all the news — and it might just sell its credibility in the process.
