Word: contentment
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...more a call to arms than an actual intention. "The news world treats Rupert as an oracle," says Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst for Outsell. "He could be trying to be the pied piper." The New York Times, which in the past has experimented with charging for online content, is expected to make an announcement about a new fee model at the end of summer. In the days that followed Murdoch's announcement, the Financial Times, which charges for some content, and the Boston Globe dropped hints that they were looking into different payment schemes. Time Inc. has raised...
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...
Internet experts say that almost everybody who has ever tried charging for content has failed. Murdoch is out of touch, they suggest. Michael Wolff, whose book on Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, came out in December, says he was shocked to learn that Murdoch didn't have an e-mail address, could barely use his cell phone and had not been on the Internet unaided. "Technology," writes Wolff, "has always been regarded as one of those things, like fancy hotels, or long-form writing, that are not part of [News Corp.'s] culture...