Word: contently
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...could almost hear the sighs of relief in the hushed, thickly carpeted corridors of high-powered media executives on Aug. 6, when News Corp. chairman and managing director Rupert Murdoch announced that he was going to start charging for online news content by July 2010. At last, they exulted, somebody was jumping in and demanding that consumers pay for a product that has been given away for nothing on the Web. And even better, that somebody was not them...
...Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting," Murdoch said during a call with analysts and reporters. The Wall Street Journal, which he owns, is one of the very few news operations to charge users to see its content online. Now he wants to put all his sites - News Corp. is the biggest producer of news in the English-speaking world - behind a pay wall. That includes the online output of papers that run the spectrum of quality all the way from the snobby Times...
Murdoch's conundrum remains that his advertising-driven properties - news and broadcast TV - are in the dunny, as the Australian media baron might say, while the pay-for-content properties - movies and cable - are holding steady or growing. (His Internet assets, including MySpace, lost a third of their value. But to be fair, nobody has figured out how to make money from social networking yet.) So why not, he figures, get paid for all the content...
...announcement, Murdoch was butting into a long-running debate that has risen several decibels since the recession hit and blew out most of the advertising that the news industry relies on. As newspaper after magazine folds or seeks a buyer, pro-payment advocates are affirming ever more urgently that content is expensive to produce and they can't afford to keep giving it away on the Web. The free agents counter that Web publishing is based on getting traffic - the so-called link economy - and pay walls stop that dead. Customers also claim they...
...crops were the Fox cable channels, particularly FNC, which showed a 50% rise in operating income. FNC's head, Roger Ailes, with whom Murdoch has clashed before, is likely to oppose any switch to an online fee model. It would be commercial suicide for FoxNews.com to charge for content until CNN.com and MSNBC.com do. And even if - and it's a big if - most major news websites were to follow Fox's lead, the BBC wouldn't, because it's not supposed to make money...