21st Century Business model

[Matt 0]

Not sure that many people would sign up. It's not just the delivery medium of news that's moved on, but the content itself. Keeping yourself informed is a doddle, while discussion and debate are permanent occurances over the internet.

 

Comparing it to the WSJ is daft- I suspect their site also contains a lot of market information and company reports (as FT.com does).

 

WSJ subscribers pay on their expenses anyway.

 

Still think the media industry has to get a return from its output. The issue is that if print media outlets cant, they will go out of business. Which means consolidation and mergers, which returns greater power to the remaining giants. Like Murdoch.

 

I'd say the opposite is true. The ability to publish and disseminate content electronically has removed the barriers that kept the big media operations in power. Papers are printed and distributed through the same channels anyway- I can't see how there would be huge savings- the only difference would be fewer journo staff- and that's already kicking in.

 

Their current online offerings cannibalise their print sales undoubtedly, but it's ambitious to think they can make up the difference by charging to visit their website. The overall quality is too low with many alternatives available. What would stop someone constructing the bit-torrent equivalent for news sites? And with most content being just text, it would be rapid.

[ChezGiven 0]

who will pay for the SUn on line??

 

There is a lot of evidence that poeple will pay for specialised content for their job or hobbies or wnatever but never for news

The trick is understanding what people 'will' do, not just what they do now.

 

The trick is not allowing them to realise what they don't need.

 

Passive aggressive shopping.

 

[ChezGiven 0]

Not sure that many people would sign up. It's not just the delivery medium of news that's moved on, but the content itself. Keeping yourself informed is a doddle, while discussion and debate are permanent occurances over the internet.

 

Comparing it to the WSJ is daft- I suspect their site also contains a lot of market information and company reports (as FT.com does).

 

WSJ subscribers pay on their expenses anyway.

 

Still think the media industry has to get a return from its output. The issue is that if print media outlets cant, they will go out of business. Which means consolidation and mergers, which returns greater power to the remaining giants. Like Murdoch.

 

I'd say the opposite is true. The ability to publish and disseminate content electronically has removed the barriers that kept the big media operations in power. Papers are printed and distributed through the same channels anyway- I can't see how there would be huge savings- the only difference would be fewer journo staff- and that's already kicking in.

 

Their current online offerings cannibalise their print sales undoubtedly, but it's ambitious to think they can make up the difference by charging to visit their website. The overall quality is too low with many alternatives available. What would stop someone constructing the bit-torrent equivalent for news sites? And with most content being just text, it would be rapid.

 

It may have removed barriers (in supply) but it also creates them too, since there is no revenue to be made from the supply of news.

 

As the industry gets squeezed further, it will consolidate, thats fundamental Matt.

 

It may be ambitious, in much the same way the music industry is attempting to make money from their own content.

 

My view is that people use sites like Guardian online, The Times etc because they value doing so, not just becasue they are free. For media sites to continue operating, they need to stop making losses. There only seems to be one logical conclusion.

[Matt 0]

Sure the websites are of value, but would they be of sufficient value above what is being provided for free? Would you have to pay for each newspaper title, or would there be multi-title subscriptions available?

 

It'll make money, but it's not going to revolutionise the market. Making existing content available for a fee will only create a space in which collaborative works can be published. A pure online offering would not need to subsidise the overheads of the print division.

 

My point wasnt saying their wouldn't be mergers, stragglers are likely to be snapped up, but the revenue generating power they once held is clearly diminishing.

[ChezGiven 0]

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ne...icle6256359.ece

 

All of them subscribed to a widely accepted business blueprint: build huge global audiences with a free service and let advertising pay the bills. The problem is: the model doesn’t seem to be working.

 

In April, for example, a startling report by analysts at Credit Suisse bank estimated YouTube will lose $470m this year. Despite the site’s 41% share of the online video market, Credit Suisse projects that it will pull inonly$240m in advertising revenue this year against costs of $711m. Google, YouTube’s owner, said the numbers were incorrect but refused to release any alternative figures.

 

It is far from alone. Last year, Veoh, a San Diego-based video-sharing site, decided to block its service to users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering there.

 

Facebook, the social network, is also considering lowering the quality of videos and photographs to some regions in an effort to reduce costs.

 

“The idea that everything has to be free was so voguishly accepted and this is an epochal moment in the fightback,” said Ashley Highfield, managing director of consumers and online at Microsoft and the man who created the BBC’s iPlayer

 

Read that in the print edition yesterday. Should have saved myself the money tbh.

[Cid_MCDP 0]

Not sure that many people would sign up. It's not just the delivery medium of news that's moved on, but the content itself. Keeping yourself informed is a doddle, while discussion and debate are permanent occurances over the internet.

 

Comparing it to the WSJ is daft- I suspect their site also contains a lot of market information and company reports (as FT.com does).

 

WSJ subscribers pay on their expenses anyway.

 

Still think the media industry has to get a return from its output. The issue is that if print media outlets cant, they will go out of business. Which means consolidation and mergers, which returns greater power to the remaining giants. Like Murdoch.

 

I'd say the opposite is true. The ability to publish and disseminate content electronically has removed the barriers that kept the big media operations in power. Papers are printed and distributed through the same channels anyway- I can't see how there would be huge savings- the only difference would be fewer journo staff- and that's already kicking in.

 

Their current online offerings cannibalise their print sales undoubtedly, but it's ambitious to think they can make up the difference by charging to visit their website. The overall quality is too low with many alternatives available. What would stop someone constructing the bit-torrent equivalent for news sites? And with most content being just text, it would be rapid.

 

It may have removed barriers (in supply) but it also creates them too, since there is no revenue to be made from the supply of news.

 

As the industry gets squeezed further, it will consolidate, thats fundamental Matt.

 

It may be ambitious, in much the same way the music industry is attempting to make money from their own content.

 

My view is that people use sites like Guardian online, The Times etc because they value doing so, not just becasue they are free. For media sites to continue operating, they need to stop making losses. There only seems to be one logical conclusion.

 

Really though, it's because the newspapers can't figure out online advertising.

 

In a traditional paper, they make money two ways- advertising and the reader's money.

 

They're just trying to do the same thing now- they have online advertising money, but now they want the reader's money again.

 

Where they screwed up was letting us have it for free this long. The cat's out of the bag, and unless they get all newspapers to stop offering free content, they'll have a hard time charging readers, and since no newspaper seems to be able to figure out how to make substantial money off of online advertising, it's the only option they think they have.

 

ESPN went to this model a few years ago where you could read like major news (that everyone else was reporting on in addition to ESPN), but the exclusive or in-depth type stuff you had to buy an insider subscription to read. Dunno why the papers don't just do that. Give away an insider account with anyone who pays for the print copy, let online-only type people buy an account (for less than the paper obviously), maybe cut down the ads on the exclusive content a bit, increase the ads on the free stories and call it a day.

Edited May 11, 2009 by Cid_MCDP

[ChezGiven 0]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbys...-by-August.html

[Rob W 0]

I can't see it - I pay for specialised content related to work

 

 

I buy a newspaper

 

But why pay to read a paper online?

 

It'll never work unless he can shut down the Beeb -so expect a big push from the Murdoch papers about "unfair" competition

[Happy Face 29]

Murdoch’s papers have relentlessly assaulted common truth and decency, but their most successful war has been on journalism itself

 

I met Eddie Spearritt in the Philharmonic pub, overlooking Liverpool. It was a few years after 96 Liverpool football fans had been crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, on 15 April 1989. Eddie's son, Adam, aged 14, died in his arms. The "main reason for the disaster", Lord Justice Taylor subsequently reported, was the "failure" of the police, who had herded fans into a lethal pen.

 

 

“As I lay in my hospital bed," Eddie said, “the hospital staff kept the Sun away from me. It's bad enough when you lose your 14-year-old son because you're treating him to a football match. Nothing can be worse than that. But since then I've had to defend him against all the rubbish printed by the Sun about everyone there being a hooligan and drinking. There was no hooliganism. During 31 days of Lord Justice Taylor's inquiry, no blame was attributed because of alcohol. Adam never touched it in his life."

 

 

Three days after the disaster, Kelvin MacKenzie, Rupert Murdoch's "favourite editor", sat down and designed the Sun front page, scribbling "THE TRUTH" in huge letters. Beneath it, he wrote three subsidiary headlines: "Some fans picked pockets of victims" . . . "Some fans urinated on the brave cops" . . . "Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life". All of it was false; MacKenzie was banking on anti-Liverpool prejudice.

 

 

When sales of the Sun fell by almost 40 per cent on Merseyside, Murdoch ordered his favourite editor to feign penitence. BBC Radio 4 was chosen as his platform. The "sarf London" accent that was integral to MacKenzie's fake persona as an "ordinary punter" was now a contrite, middle-class voice that fitted Radio 4. "I made a rather serious error," said MacKenzie, who has since been back on Radio 4 in a very different mood,aggressively claiming that the Sun's treatment of Hillsborough was merely a "vehicle for others".

 

 

When we met, Eddie Spearritt mentioned MacKenzie and Murdoch with a dignified anger.

So did Joan Traynor, who lost two sons, Christopher and Kevin, whose funeral was invaded by MacKenzie's photographers even though Joan had asked for her family's privacy to be respected. The picture of her sons' coffins on the front page of a paper that had

lied about the circumstances of their death so deeply upset her that for years she could barely speak about it.

 

 

Such relentless inhumanity forms the iceberg beneath the Guardian's current exposé of Murdoch's alleged payment of £1m hush money to those whose phones his News of the World reporters have criminally invaded. "A cultural Chernobyl," is how the German investigative journalist Reiner Luyken, based in London, described Murdoch's effect on British life. Of course, there is a colourful Fleet Street history of lies, damn lies, but no proprietor ever attained the infectious power of Murdoch's putrescence. To public truth and decency and freedom, he is as the dunghill

is to the blowfly. The rich and famous can usually defend themselves with expensive libel actions; but most of Murdoch's victims are people like the Hillsborough parents, who suffer without recourse.

 

 

The Murdoch "ethos" was demonstrated right from the beginning of his career, as Richard Neville has documented. In 1964, his Sydney tabloid, the Daily Mirror, published the diary of a 14-year-old schoolgirl under the headline, "WE HAVE SCHOOLGIRL'S ORGY DIARY". A 13-year-old boy, who was identified, was expelled from the same school. Soon afterwards, he hanged himself from his mother's clothesline. The "sex diary" was subsequently found to be fake. Soon after Murdoch bought the News of the World in 1971, a strikingly similar episode involving an adolescent diary led to the suicide of a 15-year-old girl. And Murdoch himself said, of the industrial killing of innocent men, women and children in Iraq: "There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now . . ."

 

 

His most successful war has been on journalism itself. A leading Murdoch retainer, Andrew Neil, the Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sunday Times, conducted one of his master's most notorious smear campaigns against ITV (like the BBC, a "monopoly" standing in Murdoch's way). In 1988, the ITV company Thames Television made Death on the Rock, an investigative documentary that lifted a veil on the British secret state under Margaret Thatcher, describing how an SAS team had murdered four unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar with their hands in the air.

 

 

The message was clear: Thatcher was willing to use death squads. The Sunday Times and the Sun, side by side in Murdoch's razor-wired Wapping fortress, echoed Thatcher's scurrilous attacks on Thames Television and subjected the principal witness to the murders, Carmen Proetta, to a torrent of lies and personal abuse. She later won £300,000 in libel damages, and a public inquiry vindicated the programme's accuracy and integrity. This did not prevent Thames, an innovative broadcaster, from losing its licence.

 

 

Murdoch's most obsequious supplicants are politicians, especially New Labour. Having ensured that Murdoch pays minimal tax, and having attended the farewell party of one editor of the Sun, Gordon Brown was recently in full fawn at the wedding of another editor of the same paper. Don Corleone expects nothing less.

 

 

The hypocrisy, however, is almost magical. In 1995, Murdoch flew Tony and Cherie Blair first-class to Hayman Island, Australia, where the aspiring war criminal spoke about "the need for a new moral purpose in politics", which included the lifting of government regulations on the media. Murdoch shook his hand warmly. The next day the Sun commented: "Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life."

 

 

The two are devout Christians, after all.

 

Source

[Park Life 70]

Make up a fairly convincing Excel doc

Send it to rich people

Pay yourself and give yourself as many shares and cash in the first two years as humanly possible (before it all goes tits up)

Repeat.

 

 

©Parkenstien

[Bombadil 0]

Murdoch’s papers have relentlessly assaulted common truth and decency, but their most successful war has been on journalism itself

 

I met Eddie Spearritt in the Philharmonic pub, overlooking Liverpool. It was a few years after 96 Liverpool football fans had been crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, on 15 April 1989. Eddie's son, Adam, aged 14, died in his arms. The "main reason for the disaster", Lord Justice Taylor subsequently reported, was the "failure" of the police, who had herded fans into a lethal pen.

 

 

“As I lay in my hospital bed," Eddie said, “the hospital staff kept the Sun away from me. It's bad enough when you lose your 14-year-old son because you're treating him to a football match. Nothing can be worse than that. But since then I've had to defend him against all the rubbish printed by the Sun about everyone there being a hooligan and drinking. There was no hooliganism. During 31 days of Lord Justice Taylor's inquiry, no blame was attributed because of alcohol. Adam never touched it in his life."

 

 

Three days after the disaster, Kelvin MacKenzie, Rupert Murdoch's "favourite editor", sat down and designed the Sun front page, scribbling "THE TRUTH" in huge letters. Beneath it, he wrote three subsidiary headlines: "Some fans picked pockets of victims" . . . "Some fans urinated on the brave cops" . . . "Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life". All of it was false; MacKenzie was banking on anti-Liverpool prejudice.

 

 

When sales of the Sun fell by almost 40 per cent on Merseyside, Murdoch ordered his favourite editor to feign penitence. BBC Radio 4 was chosen as his platform. The "sarf London" accent that was integral to MacKenzie's fake persona as an "ordinary punter" was now a contrite, middle-class voice that fitted Radio 4. "I made a rather serious error," said MacKenzie, who has since been back on Radio 4 in a very different mood,aggressively claiming that the Sun's treatment of Hillsborough was merely a "vehicle for others".

 

 

When we met, Eddie Spearritt mentioned MacKenzie and Murdoch with a dignified anger.

So did Joan Traynor, who lost two sons, Christopher and Kevin, whose funeral was invaded by MacKenzie's photographers even though Joan had asked for her family's privacy to be respected. The picture of her sons' coffins on the front page of a paper that had

lied about the circumstances of their death so deeply upset her that for years she could barely speak about it.

 

 

Such relentless inhumanity forms the iceberg beneath the Guardian's current exposé of Murdoch's alleged payment of £1m hush money to those whose phones his News of the World reporters have criminally invaded. "A cultural Chernobyl," is how the German investigative journalist Reiner Luyken, based in London, described Murdoch's effect on British life. Of course, there is a colourful Fleet Street history of lies, damn lies, but no proprietor ever attained the infectious power of Murdoch's putrescence. To public truth and decency and freedom, he is as the dunghill

is to the blowfly. The rich and famous can usually defend themselves with expensive libel actions; but most of Murdoch's victims are people like the Hillsborough parents, who suffer without recourse.

 

 

The Murdoch "ethos" was demonstrated right from the beginning of his career, as Richard Neville has documented. In 1964, his Sydney tabloid, the Daily Mirror, published the diary of a 14-year-old schoolgirl under the headline, "WE HAVE SCHOOLGIRL'S ORGY DIARY". A 13-year-old boy, who was identified, was expelled from the same school. Soon afterwards, he hanged himself from his mother's clothesline. The "sex diary" was subsequently found to be fake. Soon after Murdoch bought the News of the World in 1971, a strikingly similar episode involving an adolescent diary led to the suicide of a 15-year-old girl. And Murdoch himself said, of the industrial killing of innocent men, women and children in Iraq: "There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now . . ."

 

 

His most successful war has been on journalism itself. A leading Murdoch retainer, Andrew Neil, the Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sunday Times, conducted one of his master's most notorious smear campaigns against ITV (like the BBC, a "monopoly" standing in Murdoch's way). In 1988, the ITV company Thames Television made Death on the Rock, an investigative documentary that lifted a veil on the British secret state under Margaret Thatcher, describing how an SAS team had murdered four unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar with their hands in the air.

 

 

The message was clear: Thatcher was willing to use death squads. The Sunday Times and the Sun, side by side in Murdoch's razor-wired Wapping fortress, echoed Thatcher's scurrilous attacks on Thames Television and subjected the principal witness to the murders, Carmen Proetta, to a torrent of lies and personal abuse. She later won £300,000 in libel damages, and a public inquiry vindicated the programme's accuracy and integrity. This did not prevent Thames, an innovative broadcaster, from losing its licence.

 

 

Murdoch's most obsequious supplicants are politicians, especially New Labour. Having ensured that Murdoch pays minimal tax, and having attended the farewell party of one editor of the Sun, Gordon Brown was recently in full fawn at the wedding of another editor of the same paper. Don Corleone expects nothing less.

 

 

The hypocrisy, however, is almost magical. In 1995, Murdoch flew Tony and Cherie Blair first-class to Hayman Island, Australia, where the aspiring war criminal spoke about "the need for a new moral purpose in politics", which included the lifting of government regulations on the media. Murdoch shook his hand warmly. The next day the Sun commented: "Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life."

 

 

The two are devout Christians, after all.

 

Source

 

Thanks for posting this, good read.

[Park Life 70]

Quite simply one of the most evil men walking the planet. Now an American citizen of course.

[ChezGiven 0]

Did google just blink?

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009...just_blink.html

[The Fish 8989]

I dunno, but Atlas shrugged...

[ChezGiven 0]

Google and Murdoch head to head, whats not to like?

 

http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2009/12...click-free.html

 

Jimmy Wales has to beg nowadays.