Can Rupert’s crazy plan work?

I have to admit, when I first read Rupert Murdoch’s comments that he would charge for content on all his websites, I thought he was joking. Surely this was just a canny ruse to deflect headlines from a distinctly depressing set of financial results?

But a story on our sister site Brandrepublic suggests this plan really is going ahead. Not just that, Murdoch has approached a series of other publishers to set up a consortium to do it. The story says:

The Los Angeles Times says News Corp chief digital officer, Jonathan Miller, is believed to have met with media firms including the New York Times Company, the Washington Post Company, Hearst Corporation, and Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times.

Miller is said to have been positioning News Corp as the ideal organisation to lead the online news industry’s move into charging for content in part because of the fact that it already charges for online content through the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones’ business intelligence and news service Factiva, and operates other paid-for services such as satellite TV platforms Sky and Star TV.

Instinctively this feels wrong. There will still be free news sources out there (not least the BBC). And will people really pay for such high-quality journalism as The Sun (current headline: “Mayor held over missing undies”) or The News of the World (current headline: “A bit of Kerry’s nose fell out ‘cos of coke’”)?

Still, if this is going work, scale really will count. In Asia, we have the South China Morning Post, whose web operations have languished behind a paywall. As its experience has shown, the only way to make this work is to have behind your paywall a huge amount of content that people simply can’t easily get hold of elsewhere. And, for the general news market, you need to be targeting a big enough pool of consumers to make sure all the little payments you receive more than make up for the advertising you stand to lose.

Murdoch has already reinvented the media industry several times over. Maybe, just maybe, if he can get enough publishers to join in, they might stand a chance.


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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 9:55 am and is filed under Media. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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