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You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
David Simon Still Dead-Wrong, Now Encouraging Newspapers to Commit Federal Crimes
David Simon: Dead-Wrong Dinosaur
Layoffs at Men's Health and Women's Health?
'Wire' Creator Proud of New HBO Miniseries, No Matter Who Wrote it
The Wire's David Simon To Further Depress Us With New Iraq War Series
The Coda
The Hubris of David Simon
Why David Simon Should Shut Down The Wire
The Ubiquitous David Simon

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HurtsSoGood
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
What? You mean you have to pay to watch Glenn Beck rant and rave online? That's like charging people for the privilege of somebody farting in their general direction.
Seriously, I didn't watch Fox Noise before. That stuff rots your brain. Why would I pay for the privilege of having my IQ lowered?
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JesseFenderburg
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
OR, if you want, you can read all of News Corp's shit for free RIGHT NOW. Go to www.wsj.com, pick a story that only gives access to subscribers, and GOOGLE THE EXACT HEADLINE. Guess what? They ALSO want their content indexed by Google, so if you enter a WSJ story via a search engine, YOU GO AROUND THE PAY WALL AND READ THE WHOLE STORY. Sorry about the shouting, I'm excitable.
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Sharksbreath
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
This is going to be fun watching Rupert destroy his company.
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PandoraSpocks
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
Rotsa Ruck Rupert.
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timeoutofmind
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
i couldn't get past 'paying for Glenn Beck'.
i'd pay extra NOT to be able to see him or hear him, ever. is that what he means ?
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PutnamChthonius
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
Wow. At a time when Americans are broke and out of work, what’s another way to break their spirit? Start charging for the dissemination of information. Way to go Rupert, you just flushed the crusade(s) of your Fox News hosts right down the toilet. “We’re behind you middle class workers, as long as you pay us.” How many times, in the history of the internet, has paying for an online service made it more successful and more popular?
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HurtsSoGood
08/06/09

@PutnamChthonius: You assume, of course, that what News Corporation produces is information. RW propaganda is more like it.
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Fortyseven
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
"Banzai!"
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Uncle_Billy_Slumming
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
Rupert, call me. You're going to want to raid the family trust funds at some point. I can help you dilute them. We can start at a 50/50 split and then I'll let you chisel me down to 20%. This means you'll have to adopt me, but don't worry, I love yachts and China, and Luxembourg!
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gawkimo
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
Paying to read the Wall St. Journal online is like paying to toss Arthur Laffer's salad in a public bathroom.
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lionel-mandrake
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
Mr. Murdoch, crazy and offensive and politically reactionary as he is, has been in the money-makin' business a whole lot longer than me, or, I venture to guess, anyone who reads this site. So scoff at the crazy old coot at your own risk. I think this is the first volley in a much broader battle.
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badasscat
08/06/09

@lionel-mandrake: Those who would forget history are doomed to repeat it etc. etc.
This has been tried before. It has failed before. It will fail again, and nothing about Rupert Murdoch being Rupert Murdoch will change that.
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lionel-mandrake
08/06/09

@badasscat: By point of example: there's also the fact that besides his obvious media holdings, Newscorp is the parent company of SkyTV. In that capacity, SkyTV controls a significant portion of the entire media spectrum globally, not just on the web. If you've traveled abroad in Europe and Asia in the last 10-15 years you'd see just how pervasive Sky (and Newscorp by extension) is as a media company. The ability to leverage that amount of market share to support this web initiative is kind of hard to estimate. I'm just saying, you underestimate Murdoch's reach at your own risk.
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SpyMagician
08/06/09

@badasscat: It failed before because the world was not as connected online as it is now. Nowadays, the Kindle, iPhone and Blackberries are valid platforms. Charge them some amount per month and they will pay for the convenience.
I think 2010/2011 will be the years where this switch happens... But not for all pubs.
I can easily see the Wall Street Journal charging for access. No brainer.
But for New York Post? Nah. They can pump ads up the wazoo on that thing and offset cost.
Pay for content is not an automatic thing, but for some content it will work well.
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lionel-mandrake
08/06/09

@SpyMagician: The Post doesn't count, it's been a loss-leader since Murdoch purchased it. It's never been profitable.
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Barret Lee Fisher
08/06/09

In reply to You Will Soon Pay to Access All of Rupert Murdoch's Online Rubbish
He warned that "the big competition will be coming from the BBC," which offers online news for free, but said: "Our policy is to win."'

The BBC has clearly cornered the market on this "free news" fad.
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The Cajun Boy promoted this comment Edited by Barret Lee Fisher at 08/06/09 5:29 AM Barret Lee Fisher was starred

Robert Synnott
08/06/09

@Barret Lee Fisher: There's competition between Fox News and the BBC? Surely any Fox News reader/watcher would explode in wingnut rage if exposed to the terrible BIASED BBC? :)
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gooneruk
08/06/09

@Barret Lee Fisher: Yeah, for everybody who isn't British. Everybody in the UK pays a "licence fee" which funds the BBC, including its newsgathering and website departments.
[OK, almost everybody. There are a few people who don't own TVs and don't pay. Weirdos.]
If you view BBC News, or any other BBC website from outside the UK, you get adverts, in an effort to provide funding for all of the bandwidth consumption, etc, that non-Brits use. Else we British would be subsidising the site for everyone else in the world!
So "free" only really applies to point-of-use. It's not totally free for its main audience of Brits.
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lionel-mandrake
08/06/09

@Robert Synnott: Surely you know that the Fox News Channel is tiny, almost insignificant part of the Newscorp whole, don't you? In fact, in the UK, through its various SkyTV entities, Newscorp is the main competition for the BBC.
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lionel-mandrake
08/06/09

@Robert Synnott: Surely you know that the Fox News Channel is tiny, almost insignificant part of the Newscorp whole, don't you? In fact, in the UK, through its various SkyTV entities, Newscorp is the main competition for the BBC.
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Rhymenocerous
08/06/09

@gooneruk: I love it when you say "adverts."
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Barret Lee Fisher
08/06/09

@gooneruk: Oh. Wow. Britain has socialized the news, too? Madness!
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germane
07/22/09

In reply to David Simon Still Dead-Wrong, Now Encouraging Newspapers to Commit Federal Crimes
So, okay, you are comfortable getting your news from multiple "observers" who are not bound by any communal or professional standards of how to report and how to redact or order what they report. Can I just ask: are you also comfortable BEING one of those "observers"? Do you think that the quality of life that a career of web journalism can offer is comparable to that which print journalism offered when free informational digests weren't an option? I'm talking about a living wage, paid vacation, insurance, relative job stability. It seems to me that this concern is also motivating Simon's hostility to the internet as a substitute instead of a supplement.
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Motoko Kusanagi
07/22/09

In reply to David Simon Still Dead-Wrong, Now Encouraging Newspapers to Commit Federal Crimes
"free to subscribers only"
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John Thompson
07/22/09

In reply to David Simon Still Dead-Wrong, Now Encouraging Newspapers to Commit Federal Crimes
While I don't think Simon's Plan to Save Newsmedia is sound, I think his greater point about the difference between blogs and journos is valid.

I'll cite an example that's being consistently reported on by one of Gawker's many satellite sites, Valleywag. The blog Techcrunch was given leaked documents that are quite embarrassing to Twitter (http://gawker.com/5316432/techcrunch-supresses-its-best-scoops-at-twitters-request), and the response from the tech blogosphere at large to Techcrunch's publishing of the documents has been nearly unanimous in its contempt and outrage over otherwise unremarkable scoop journalism, the sort that one would think ought to be enthusiastically pursued by traditional outlets (Simon's own portrayal of newspapers doesn't seem to give the idea much credence, I have to say).

This is the exact sort of cozy, incestuous relationship between journalists and public figures that citizen journalism was supposed to do away with. Isn't it troubling that these journalists of the not-so-distant future are running screaming from the things that journalists are supposed to be doing, the things that make the fourth estate "vital to our democracy"? Even if there was a blog niche for investigative journalism that the leaked documents would have been welcomed in, the tech blogs wouldn't have run the story on principle and thus the selective readers who might be most interested in the news would likely never be aware of it. Isn't that bothersome?
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John Thompson
07/22/09

@John Thompson: Sorry, I found a more relevant Valleywag link that directly addresses the problem: http://gawker.com/5316975/
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Hunter Walker
07/22/09

In reply to David Simon Still Dead-Wrong, Now Encouraging Newspapers to Commit Federal Crimes
I don't entirely get the Simon hate on here. It's hard to get riled up about newspaper publishers setting online sub rates together when news aggregators and blogs have been doing so many questionably legal things with copyrighted content. Also, antitrust laws are intended to prevent businesses from getting too large and newspapers are essentially a failing industry.

What Simon is proposing might be a violation of antitrust regulations, but newspapers hardly seem to be a threat to people or their competitors.
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skt.smth
07/22/09

@hunterw: I honestly feel like a lot of hatred toward aggregators is unfounded, though. Of course there are egregious examples of people posting entire excerpts of news articles entirely without analysis, etc. But the old media people who rail against aggregators act like even linking to the material on their sites is some sort of copyright violation. I'm sorry, but a link, in and of itself, is exactly the same thing as saying to somebody verbally "You can find this in the New York Times! Check it out!" If they intend to turn all suggestions into copyright violations, then they'll need to get rid of their book, movie, and music reviews while they're at it.
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