Citing high "impairment and operating charges" the company incurred through its ownership of MySpace, News Corp. shareholders lost 8 cents per share and the company lost 11% of its total revenue in their fourth quarter. So it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that Murdoch would announce plans to end free access to all of his company's online offerings on the same day.

Reports the Financial Times:

Rupert Murdoch has vowed to charge for all the online content of his newspapers and television news channels, going well beyond his prediction in May that the company would test pay models on one of its stronger papers within the year.

"We intend to charge for all our news websites," Mr Murdoch said.

"If we're successful, we'll be followed by all media," he added, predicting "significant revenues" from charging for differentiated news online.

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."

Murdoch's move, if he holds fast to his plans, could play a substantial role in the future of content availability on the internet. While charging for online access to the Wall Street Journal has been mildly successful due to the willingness of the paper's affluent readership to pony up, it'll be interesting to see if the same holds true for New Corp.'s other, less "classy" properties. If his move to force people to pay for access to Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, the News of the World, the New York Post, etc. is successful, expect many others to follow suit, something sure to please David Simon. However, this idea sure as shit seems to have fail written all over it.

Pic via

In a sort of open letter essay to the publishers of the Times and Post published by the Columbia Journalism Review, Simon pleaded for the newspapers to blatantly defy federal anti-trust laws and just blame it all on him when the FBI shows up on their doorsteps.

You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future-let's say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it-both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work.

No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling or pennies-on-the-dollar fees. Either you believe that what The New York Times and The Washington Post bring to the table every day has value, or you don't.

You must both also individually inform the wire-service consortiums that unless they limit membership to publications, online or off, that provide content only through paid subscriptions, you intend to withdraw immediately from those consortiums. Then, for good measure, you might each make a voluntary donation-let's say $10 million-to a newspaper trade group to establish a legal fund to pursue violations of copyright, either by online aggregators or large-scale blogs, much in the way other industries based on intellectual property have fought to preserve their products.

And when the Justice Department lawyers arrive, briefcases in hand, to ask why America's two national newspapers did these things in concert-resulting in a sea change within newspapering as one regional newspaper after another followed suit in pursuit of fresh, lifesaving revenue-you can answer directly: We never talked. Not a word. We read some rant in the Columbia Journalism Review that made the paywall argument. Blame the messenger.

Yeah, we're sure that'll fly really well with the feds.

And of course, Simon couldn't resist taking another of his patented shots at the internet on his way out of the door.

In the newspaper industry, however, the fledgling efforts of new media to replicate the scope, competence, and consistency of a healthy daily paper have so far yielded little in the way of genuine competition. A blog here, a citizen journalist there, a news Web site getting under way in places where the newspaper is diminished-some of it is quite good, but none of it so far begins to achieve consistently what a vibrant newspaper, staffed with competent, paid beat reporters and editors, once offered. New-media entities are not yet able to truly cover-day after day-the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations. And until new models emerge that are capable of paying reporters and editors to do such work-in effect becoming online newspapers with all the gravitas this implies-they are not going to get us anywhere close to professional journalism's potential.

Detroit lost to a better, new product; newspapers, to the vague suggestion of one.

In other words, the internet may look like a Toyota, but it's really a Hyundai. Or something.

Now, I agree with Simon that some sort of payment model for newspaper content needs to be developed, but as my colleague Ryan Tate pointed out so well back in May, Simon, who hasn't worked as a journalist since the mid-90s and is clearly staggeringly ignorant about many aspects of the internet, is, simply, a "dead-wrong dinosaur" in his assertions about the inability of the web to cover "the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations." There are numerous websites doing incredible work covering society, culture and politics on a national level, and in his post, Ryan cited a few examples of individual citizens using blogs to shine light on issues in their local communities, something that continues to happen more and more all over the place. Hell, a group of plugged-in Alaskan citizens just about drove Sarah Palin to the brink of insanity with their pesky meddling, and as inexpensive, high-speed access to the internet continues to proliferate and the cost of the computer equipment necessary to create online content continues to drop, this sort of thing will become more and more commonplace.

As a collective source of news the internet is certainly not yet on par with newspapers that have been around for decades, but personally I've become much more comfortable getting my news from passionate individual observers than I am with getting my news from an institution forced to play politics with other institutions in order to maintain its oh-so-sacred "access" over the passage of time. If anyone should understand this feeling and sympathize with it, you'd think it'd be David Simon. After all, The Wire was a show about the corruption of American institutions, one of which was a newspaper! And frankly, let's be brutally honest here, the stuff taught in journalism schools isn't exactly, well, rocket science. Is it helpful and advantageous to have such an education if one chooses to embark on a career in media? Yes. But is it an absolute prerequisite? No. Because the lack of a journalism school education is nothing that can't be overcome with sheer determination and simple common sense. Period.

Look, I don't want newspapers to die. I love newspapers. They've been an integral part of my daily life since I was a kid. Ideally, in a perfect world, some happy medium can be reached, some middle ground can be found where newspapers and internet news sources are both able to survive and thrive. But in the course of the natural progression of things, sometimes things just die. Yes, it's sad, but it's just the way it is. Accept it.

The irony in all of this is that The Wire, the television show David Simon created/produced/wrote, owes a lot of its success to, wait for it—the internet! The Wire was, and continues to be, the darling of internet people. Web buzz played a huge part in the show's staying on the air for five seasons, not to mention how it's helped the show remain a part of the national conversation since going off the air. Hell, I personally rented and eventually bought the complete series on DVD earlier this year entirely because of the giant internet circlejerk over the damn thing. So, yeah, this is all so very, well, ironic.

Finally, I like David Simon a lot and he's someone that I and many others look up to, but really, it's time for him to just shut the fuck up.

Build the Wall [CJR]

The Wire creator, David Simon, was a cops reporter at the Baltimore Sun for 12 years, ending in 1995. He then made a lucrative second career in fiction and Hollywood before detouring into a sideline as a cranky, reactionary media pundit this past year.

Simon told the Senate Commerce Committee today bloggers don't go to city council meetings, or know what the hell is going on if they do — a clichéd, out of touch refrain common among newspapermen who can't be bothered to do any reporting on the assertion. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from a Newark Star-Ledger columnist to this effect:

Don't expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings... a lot of bloggers will be found gasping for breath under piles of pure ennui. There is nothing more tedious than a public meeting.

New York Times media columnist David Carr often capitalizes on the idea that bloggers don't do government in his repeated columns about how newspapers must restrict their websites:

The capacity to produce accountability reporting... and robust coverage of public officials is not sustainable under current revenue models.

And here's Simon, right before winding up to his punch line about "relaxing certain anti-trust prohibitions:"

I found this argument odd, because as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as "gadflies" — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived.

And they weren't exactly a big secret. Here's a year-old San Francisco Chronicle article that Simon apparently missed about some of this motley crew; here's a report in Oakland's alt-weekly recounting one Oakland blogger's post on a politically-rigged block-grant meeting in West Oakland (nitty gritty enough for you, Simon?); Here's the Oakland Tribune quoting various bloggers on an intricate city council debate involving cabaret permits.

Collectively, these bloggers are doing just what Simon suggests: attending meetings, developing sources and holding government accountable every day.

And the best of the crop are doing so individually, on their own and, somehow, basically for free. Simon should spend as much time as he can on A Better Oakland (original posts down the center column), a thoroughly reported blog on the nitty-gritty of Oakland politics, complete with key video moments from government meetings, illuminating crime analysis, skillful fact-checking of political puffery, transit coverage, development coverage, thorough meeting recaps, spicy guest posts, and, yes, the occasional media criticism (along with support for the press against government stonewalling).

(Disclosure: The writer of A Better Oakland is among the bloggers I turned to as knowledgeable sources when covering Oakland, and I now count her as a friend. But you don't have to take my word about her; read the Chronicle and Express links above.)

You'll find communities of civic-minded bloggers in all sorts of places. The New York Times recently profiled the Brooklyn blog Gowanus Lounge, described elsewhere as a publication of "hard news scoops and opinionated rants" with "influence into City Hall and the executive suites of the city's biggest developers." The site was part of an ecosystem of any number of other local news blogs.

Even the mayor of the tiny city of Salisbury, Maryland claims to be "under siege" from bloggers.

With so much quality civic reporting already being done online for little or no pay, it stands to reason we could eventually get quality government reporting entirely from bloggers, both professional and amateur, rather than depending on a federally-coddled cabal of conspiring nonprofit newspapers, as Simon envisions.

And there are reasons to think the quality would actually be better, since so many of the writers are deeply invested residents, rather than the sort of superficially-engaged, careerist professional journalists portrayed so well by Simon in The Wire and all too common in American newsrooms.

Arianna Huffington may not be the ideal mogul to lead journalism into the future, but her own senate testimony offered an impressively rational and articulate vision of what's to come, at least next to Simon's:

For too long, traditional media have been afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder — they are far too quick to drop a story — even a good one, in their eagerness to move on to the Next Big Thing. Online journalists, meanwhile, tend to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder… they chomp down on a story and stay with it, refusing to move off it until they've gotten down to the marrow.



In the future, these two traits will come together and create a much healthier kind of journalism.



...We must never forget that our current media culture led to the widespread failure (with a few honorable exceptions) to serve the public interest by accurately covering two of the biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the war in Iraq and the financial meltdown.



That's why, as journalism transitions to a new and different place, the emphasis should not be on subsidizing what exists now but on how to rededicate ourselves to the highest calling of journalists — which is to ferret out the truth, wherever it leads. Even if it means losing our all-access-pass to the halls of power.

[Senate Testimony]

(Last image from the New Yorker.)

A tipster tells us that "Men's Health and Women's Health are merging advertising and marketing staffs today," a move they say will be accompanied by "big layoffs." If you have more info, email us. [UPDATE: Another tipster says "Looks like it was only one dude." If so, big whoop over not much, on our part. Please continue to emails us more info. UPDATE 2: "Rodale, publisher of brands such as Prevention and Men's Health, has cut another 20 sales-side employees," Mediaweek reports.]


The American Society of Newspaper Editors, which is, by the standards of newspapers, a pretty important organization, is canceling its annual convention, because they figured out that attendance would be low because all newspaper editors are currently bogged down writing layoff memos. Sad.

David Simon was a Baltimore Sun reporter on the police beat before he went and made The Wire and (hopefully) millions of dollars. And now he's so fed up with the god damn state of the city and the police department and the reporters there since he left that he had to go and start making calls again, himself, just recently, to get to the bottom of a crime story! And furthermore he sure as hell didn't see any "bloggers" or "citizen journalists" out there finding out the facts! Some people think David Simon is a jerk cause he's always mad and lashing out at ill-chosen targets, but I think David Simon is a great man, in his own angry way.


The LA Times: not paying its freelancers. Pay up, fuckers!

Ladies Home Journal is accused of violating the advertising/ edit wall in its recent issue featuring Ellen Degeneres. Well they took the cover photo from Cover Girl, the company for which Degeneres is a spokesmodel, and which bought ads right next to the cover story on Ellen, so yea. Still it's just incredibly hard to get outraged about crumbling journalism standards at Ladies Home Journal.

Fine — except Wright didn't write the scripts. Or did he? And did Simon and Wire collaborator Ed Burns fudge his screenwriting credit on five episodes? According to one report, excerpted after the jump, Wright could be hatching a plan for the forthcoming Generation Kill: 50% More Evan Wright Above The Line special-edition DVD:

Last summer, after HBO cut the series from eight episodes to seven, emails flew back and forth last summer from Baltimore, where Simon lives, to Baghdad, where Wright had returned to report for Rolling Stone. Wright was worried, correctly it turned out, that Simon was about to kill one of his scripts. Simon resolved the matter by giving joint credit to Wright and Burns. Again two months ago Wright had to request further credit in the wake of still more active input, and Simon agreed.

But Simon denies that Wright was responsible for half the scripts with his or Burns' name on them. "If he told you that, he's genuinely incorrect," Simon said this evening, from a screening for Marines in California, where Wright was also in attendance. He added: "Nobody wrote any of the scripts by themselves. There's stuff in Evan's script written by me and Ed. There's stuff written in total by me and Ed. There's stuff in our scripts written by Evan. That's what happens in every serialized show."

The two appear to have reached an amicable agreement, with Wright humbly acknowledging Simon's gracious Kill stewardship in exchange for the opportunity to work in this town again after a mandatory five-year probation. And seeing as that's just about as long as we have left in Iraq, a well-reported follow-up seems like an ideal re-teaming. Glad it worked out, guys.

• Who Really Wrote 'Generation Kill'? [WaxWord]

• 'Generation Kill' [LAT]

The finale of The Wire airs on HBO, this Sunday at 8pm.

First, Simon has turned his focus on his former employer, the Baltimore Sun; in newspaper terms, he's too close to the story, and the latest season's parable on the decline of the press, complete with irredeemable journalistic fabricator and empty-souled news executives, is leaden. Maybe the dockers and gangsters of earlier seasons were also less textured than the real Baltimore personalities on which they were based, but they didn't have an outlet for their complaints. Journalists do, and that has colored the reception to The Wire's latest storyline.

There's a deeper problem, which should establish why a feature, even a prequel, is such a bad idea. The saving grace of The Wire was the series' leisurely, meandering, convoluted plotline: Simon had no deadline for his political diatribes; his righteousness never overwhelmed the essential drama of crime and corruption in America's decaying industrial cities. But now the crusading former journalist has only a condensed final season, three episodes shorter than he'd hoped, in which to make all his remaining points, and demand recognition for a show which has never won a major award.

The result: embarrassingly improbable plot points, such as the fake serial killer conjured up by McNulty to shake down the mayor for police funding; absurd caricatures, particularly of journalists (see below); increasingly heavy-handed lectures on the bankruptcy of government, the press, heck, everybody; and a cascade of newspaper columns by Simon as part of the show's last-ditch marketing campaign, belaboring points which viewers should arrive at themselves. It's painful to admit: The Wire's creator has turned into one of those didactic lecturers who simply rattle out the script and raise the volume when they feel the audience slipping away from them, and the clock running out.

David Simon has struggled to compress his concluding remarks into the 10 episodes of the HBO show's fifth run. Imagine how painful it would be for him to fit his morality play into two hours of a feature movie. It would be better for him, and fans of earlier seasons, if he didn't.