Rupert Murdoch: Let's Charge for Online Content Again

Good luck with that. His version of the news has become largely irrelevant.

For the last decade people have been testing their voices and discovering how good it feels to write and report and participate in the media.

We don't need what we had, we just need net neutrality so we can have something better.

I think it will be important for journalists (and their companies) to really think about who their audiences are.

I think it will be important to simplify. And once that's done, I think the majority of people will eventually (I don't know when) pay for content because it will be of higher quality and relevance. (Some do this moderately well now.)

Frankly, I think all parties (i.e. Journalism as a whole) will probably benefit in the long-run. You may see smaller organizations, but that should enable them to adapt more efficiently as things evolve.

The key here, in my opinion, is to not get caught up in fast and excessive growth. You may even extend that to "pull-back/slow down" if you're growing too fast.

Since there are a lot of people on this site thinking about this issue and I'm just a lowly FW programmer I'd like to ask: does anyone think we're benefitting from NYT, AP, Reuters, etc. providing their content on line while their revenue stream is rapidly drying up? There's plenty of good community produced free content available but I for one would be willing to pay for the equivalent of old-style journalism at some point. I think Murdoch might just be looking ahead to that day, he's not stupid.

There's an excellent magazine called "Cook's Illustrated". It's printed in two colors, no advertisements, no celebrities and it's pretty thin but people are willing to pay for it. I'd love to see a Cook's Illustrated model emerge as a small subset of the web. It won't need much bandwidth and it'll have lower latency because it won't have dancing teeth whiteners all over the place.

I'd prefer this model to a tiered internet. Not that either are desirable for the average consumer.