Murdoch and the print versus online debate
By Desi Tzoneva
In my last Editorial Desk I discussed, Google’s attempt to help online publishers. In its latest move, Google has said that it would prevent free access to content by limiting online users to a maximum of five pages on one news site per day. The move has been seen as a better alternative to erecting pay walls, which normally results in users searching for another site where they can access the news for free. In addition to this, ‘cloaking’ – the process where users ‘cloak’ themselves and enter subscriber sites without making the prerequisite payments – would be prevented.
A recent question has been ‘how will news publishers react?’ and whether this move would help them recoup profits, or simply drive users away. Although this remains to be seen, media mogul and the largest publisher of newspapers globally, Rupert Murdoch, is all for it. In fact, he is one of the few enthusiasts in the media landscape who has both a strong disregard for the internet for ‘stealing’ newspapers’ profits, and for seeing a return to the business of selling newspapers.
In
‘Rupert to Internet: It’s War’ in
Vanity Fair, Michael Wolff offered interesting insights into the operational motivation behind Murdoch’s plans. Wolff reported that Murdoch’s main goal is for internet readers to pay for online newspaper journalism and news.
Despite 2009 being a tough year for the newspaper industry, if not the worst in its history, Murdoch doesn’t believe the recession was the main cause. According to Wolff, Murdoch believes that “newspapers are suffering not at the hands of technological forces beyond their control, but at the hands of proprietors that are weaker than he is.” In rough translation, this means he feels other media owners have jumped onto the online bandwagon, and have offered their goods for free in the hope of boosting profits through advertising. Murdoch, however, feels that this is inaccurate, and that they themselves are suffering at the hands of their own decisions.
Wolff stated that the current battle for how the internet will monetise news, divides into clear camps on the one hand, managers of established media properties and on the other, people who spend their lives in the new media business, namely online. Traditional media managers who once rushed to the internet are now retreating from the medium as a result of incurring significant monetary losses. They now want to take back their free content. However, internet professionals think that charging for general-interest news online is far-fetched.
For Murdoch, the internet is a place for “porn, thievery and hackers.” His logic involves looking for opportunities of “making people pay,” and that people genuinely can not live without a Sunday paper. Because of this, they must either buy it on the newsstand or pay for it online, despite the fact that it comes out once a week and that the web is a minute-by-minute medium.
The recent global recession is a good place for him to put his arguments forward. His businesses are typically run through old-fashioned methods of “structural market domination,” where media only runs well if it achieves significant control of the market. For him, it is necessary to invite and scare other publishers and content creators into a self-created monopoly because “if everybody charges, consumers will have no choice but to pay.”
But what about the effect of free? It has opened up opportunities for attracting greater audiences, and many have begun to monetise free traffic. This does not interest Murdoch. He believes that a publication’s strength in its quality of writing will mean that even if it’s no longer available online, readers will go out and purchase the print version.
One of the main problems, however, hasn’t really been online or offline, or print, but the fact that advertising has driven the industry for decades. Following the recession, advertisers pulled away from print and invested more in online. This isn’t the problem of online, but one of advertising. And it’s one suggestion that Wolff has made as an alternative to Murdoch’s arguments against online.
“The more he can choke off the internet as a free news medium, the more publishers he can get to join him, the more people he can bring back to his papers. It is not a war [however] which he can win in the long term,” ends Wolff.
Simply speaking, in Murdoch’s view, we need to ‘get rid of’ the internet in order to regain the flourish of the newspaper era. This is unlikely to occur. But what about advertisers – the sector that is driving this industry? If they’re rejecting print, and online is their new playground, how will they and online news publishers ensure that the business remains sustainable?
In a recent
article by the Online Publishers Association, MD of World Wide Worx, Arthur Goldstruck, commented on Murdoch’s ‘unsavory’ proposals. He stated that advertising has always paid for newspaper content and that it seems unreasonable to begin charging readers now.
One thing is certainly true - online news will continue to do better as a free option, with talks about paid content most likely to result in reduced traffic rather than increased profits. If advertisers then are the key players here, how can they benefit further from online? Solutions seem scarce. There is room for creativity, however, and the common procedures for advertising online could certainly be expanded on. Exploration into imbedded adverts within articles; attaching relevant advertisements to news items; or perhaps integrating more adverts into the text of an article, so they are more ‘in your face’ could further benefit advertisers – the knights in shining armour of the damaged industry. Furthermore, adding more value to news content for readers could be one way of keeping their interest.
What do news publishers locally think? Is Murdoch going to win the battle against the net, keep his readers, and continue to make profits? Let us know what you think by posting your comments on our
blog.
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