Rupert Murdoch makes the case for paying to read the news | Hacker News Reader

Rupert Murdoch makes the case for paying to read the news

online.wsj.com

14 pointsanigbrowl28 comments

"From the beginning, newspapers have prospered for one reason: the trust that comes from representing their readers' interests and giving them the news that's important to them"

I'm not sure that's how it works anymore. Who trusts the media these days? According to Sacred Heart University's polling in 2007 19% of Americans implicitly trusted the mainstream media. Down 8% since 2003. More alarming is that 87% felt the mainstream media was trying to manipulate them. Polls and statistics may not actually prove anything but again let me ask: Who trusts the media these days? Do you know anyone who feels that way? Maybe the extreme ideologues who are simply looking for some rah-rah cheer leading action and don't actually care about truth or facts.

The point of delivering news that's important to readers is much more valid but still very flawed. You get much better results aggregating together content from different sources or, better yet, discovering content from people you have a personal relationship with. Friends, family, co-workers. That all becomes very difficult behind a pay-wall. In this era there are less mainstream sensibilities about news. Everyone has a different weird mix of news they want to see. If you're going for a personalized delivery system you absolutely need social networks, crowd sourcing, and free access so people can discover new topics of interest.

As for quality... He's assuming people can appreciate quality when compared to stories about music stars kissing each other or golf players crashing into tree's with their luxury SUVs. I don't believe for a second that quality matters to the vast majority of the mainstream news audience. The average news paper is written to be consumed by people who struggled through junior high school English class.

You can aggregate without it being free.

Imagine a website that does news aggregation. To access the website, you have to pay $10 per month. For this $10 per month, you have the right to read all of the news posted on the website.

The website allows individual freelance writers to put their articles on it.

Now here's the catch - the $10/month that each user pays actually gets distributed by that user to writers whose articles he appreciates. So everytime he reads an exceptionally good article, he gets to assign some of his $10 to that article, as much as he wants.

At the end of the month, whether he assigns the money or not, he loses the 10 bucks. If he assigned all $10 to writers, that's fine. If he left some over, that goes to the website and is used to pay for editors, servers, hackers, etc.

This creates a situation where people are paying for aggregated content (you'd have a plethora of social networking, commenting, and rating systems tailored in whatever way is determined to be optimal) and the writers who are most appreciated by the readers are getting paid.

At the same time, the readers get to try out as much writing as they want for free, so stuff is NOT hidden behind a paywall. They can read the article first and if they find it useful to them can award their dollars. If not, they don't. This encourages quality and also encourages a wide readership.

Anyway I would totally pay $10/month for a system like this. I think you would actually see the case that many people would voluntarily choose to pay more than $10/month just so they can contribute more to their favourite authors. The whole "Radiohead Rainbows" effect.

Feel free to steal my idea and make it a Y-Combinator startup.

No way to vote for things you like more than others. Will degrade into a least common denominator system quickly.

WhatWhatWhat?!

I thought I made it clear you could assign as much money as you want to particular articles. And the amount of money assigned would obviously be used in some algorithm as a kind of sliding scale vote?

Even if that was the case, people want things as cheap as they can get them, so even if they CAN vote with their dollars, they won't do it at an unnecessary cost to themselves.

I think that is true for the great mass of men, but I think there is a minority of people willing to pay good money for high quality, ad-free content.

He's assuming people can appreciate quality when compared to stories about music stars kissing each other or golf players crashing into tree's with their luxury SUVs.

Do you know what papers Murdoch publishes? (aside from the WSJ)

Yes, that's a fair point. I wouldn't wrap dead fish in the NY Post. So disrespectful to the fish.

You know what, Rupert?

Go for it.

Don't bother writing about it and talking about it.

Do it.

Put up your pay wall and see who pays.

Until then. . . .

He kind of mentioned that when he criticized fair use. He puts up a pay wall, one person buys a subscription, blogs about it, and there isn't much he can do. He can't copyright the news after all, only his journalists' expression of it.

That applies to news but not necessarily to in-depth reporting.

Murdoch is right that people will pay for quality.

But there are almost zero commercial writing institutions that produce quality.

> But there are almost zero commercial writing institutions that produce quality.

I only subscribe to the Economist.

Yep that's why I said "almost"

I had The Economist in mind :P

This is not exactly the case. It is true that one cannot copyright facts, but I believe there are some legal doctrines that protect news papers that brake new stories.

See International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v._A...)

So I think if someone just paraphrased a pay site's stories, the pay site would be able to stop them.

Also, don't bother complaining about Google news. Just change your robots.txt file already and then the evil Google will stop aggregating your precious precious content.

Yep. STFU Rupe and put your money where your mouth is.

I agree, put up your pay wall and see who pays. The drawback is it will most likely show that really not very many people are interested enough in their product to actually pay for it. Meaning their stock prices will reflect the true circulation. I suspect they know this and fear that this move just might be the death nail in their coffin. Time will tell.

Instead of digging in their heels and believing they can force their product on the market maybe they should try to iterate.

If News Corp put up a pay wall on its content and no body paid, the world would be much better off.

Bollocks. People haven't paid for the news in a century (though we have traditionally paid for its distribution). We're not about to start now that the cost of distribution has utterly collapsed.

Fortunately, this is visible without a pay wall--otherwise I wouldn't have read it!

My guess is that after the ensuing anguish is over, and news companies have figured out how to charge for some of their content, this editorial would still have been outside the paywall.

So, your working on a startup and yet....you do want to charge your users something?

Maybe your just implying that there isn't really any need to read an article from Murdoch unless its free?

I think he is!

Exec summary: whine whine, bitch bitch.

I wont pay editorial content online. Period. I dont even use google news either. They are not the problem.

I pay for subscriptions on dead trees to arrive at my house because that is the only way I can read it in peace. Now if Murdoch has a idea that his failing businesses are failing because of the internet, good riddance. Have fun selling used cars instead, atleast they cant be digitally copied.

Rupert also made a good case for buying MySpace.

He may be good at what he does, but he does not do the internet. Somebody need to have the balls to tell it to his face.

'The prospect of the U.S. government becoming directly involved in commercial journalism ought to be chilling for anyone who cares about freedom of speech.'

Well said!

I live in that dreary, dystopian, socialist hinterland just to the north of the USA.[1] Up here, the government-owned CBC puts the commercial newsmedia utterly to shame, despite being starved for funding by our current neoconservative federal government.

[1] Sarcasm.

Murdoch puts up another fake bogeyman.

Since when is anyone suggesting that US government get involved in commercial journalism?

Just like the fake bogeyman of Google misappropriating his content when all News Corp has to do is take 20 seconds to edit the robots.txt file.

Murdoch's statements are a textbook example of disinformation. And he wants the consumer to pay for this yellow journalism?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com