The latest in the ongoing saga of Rupert Murdoch versus the BBC and Google News is that the News Corp boss maintains that the industry must charge for content. In an event at George Washington University yesterday, he said search engines were stealing journalism and ‘tapping into a river of gold’ by aggregating content. But will people ever get used to paying to read articles online, especially when free services will remain?
One answer is an iTunes model. People are so used to paying for apps and 79p song downloads that something like a 20p charge to view an article – or perhaps a more in-depth report – could be fairly well received. Interestingly also in his address yesterday, Murdoch spent a good deal of time praising the new Apple iPad, calling it “a wonderful thing” and commenting that “if you have less newspapers and more of these … It may well be the saving of the newspaper industry.” So within weeks it’s not unlikely we’ll have content from The Sun and The Times available on iTunes (Murdoch has previously stated he will look to implement pay-walls by summer this year).
Under a Cameron government also, the media industry is bound to change to some extent. The Conservatives have been vocal about scaling down the BBC, which would directly benefit newspapers and private media organisations who suffer from this competition. However, even if the next UK government is aligned with the wishes of News Corp, it seems unlikely that all news providers would follow suit and erect paywalls. Murdoch doesn’t acknowledge this however, saying that “When they [consumers] have got nowhere else to go they will start paying. If it is reasonable.”
However, will we ever be in a media landscape that is void of news content? Especially at a time when citizen journalism continues to rise? While criticism that Murdoch is a dinosaur living in the bubble of an antiquated media world sounds unfair, his solutions are yet to inspire many throughout the wider media industry…
Tags: Conservatives, iPad, iTunes, media, News Corp, paywall, Rupert Murdoch