In years gone by, Rupert Murdoch was perceived to be the man who would dumb down the newspaper industry. That didn't entirely happen, especially after he brought the Wall Street Journal and his English titles back to life. This time, though, his plan for pay-per-access for his online publications next June, has thrown the industry into a spin.
Although it could be argued that Murdoch is an unlikely messiah of the besieged newspaper industry, he is courting controversy again by his doubts about continuing to publish news online. This radical departure for the newspaper business — for years publishers have been reluctant participants of providing "free" content on their websites — is one in which could potentially bring the whole edifice crashing down.
The payment model for news has been tried before, but circumvention killed it off quite quickly. But perhaps this time he will be the man to design "the model" to address cost and revenue concerns and revolutionise an industry that is down in the doldrums at present, where his own titles are facing falling year-on-year advertising revenues of 14% as the recession continues to bite?
Almost all print titles share the same quandary: they are losing readers and advertisers to the internet. In the Guardian recently, Simon Jenkins leapt to Murdoch's defence when he wrote, "I am delighted that you are reading this column. I am more delighted if, to do so, you bought a real newspaper…If, on the other hand, you are reading it on screen then you are not paying for my work. You are getting it scot-free. Except for a dribble of advertising, you are not contributing to the Guardian's precarious finances, or to mine. You are also giving me the uncomfortable feeling that, if you were not reading for free, you would not bother at all."
And that sentiment accurately sums up the blockade, suggesting that traditional mainstream online news will be soon be behind a "paywall". Murdoch's "New Deal", in which he hopes to set sail a transformation of reduced costs and increased revenue may or may not work. In fairness, Simon Jenkins did admit that, "The New York Times paywall generated $10m a year", but it didn't last.
The same could be said for the music industry, where CD sales crashed and, in parallel, no one has come up with a working model on how to produce a platform for music in which people are prepared to pay for it. Now comes the time for the newspaper industry to take stock, just as the music industry has had to adapt over the past decade or more.
As Mr Jenkins succinctly noted: "British newspapers are stunned and traumatised. The recession has ripped the bottom from their boat. I am sure they will refloat somehow, as they did at the end of the 19th century with the advent of rotary presses and mass readership."
Let's face it, the newspaper industry needs to do something, if not only to revive Mr Murdoch's fortunes, and such declines in readership and circulation because of the internet has the industry reeling. Last week Murdoch issued notice that although it will not spell the end of newspapers as we know them, in future readers will have to pay for what they read online.
Slashdot's take on it in "A Recipe for Newspaper Survival in the Internet Age", was that the author went to many mainstream journalists' and editors' conferences and the most-asked question was, "How do we adapt to the internet?" He was astonished that, "With all the smart people working for newspapers, that by now most of them would have figured out how to use the internet effectively enough that it would produce a significant percentage of their profits. But they haven't."
But neither has the music industry found a method to circumvent file-sharing sites where users can download music for free. Nor has the film industry.
But views do get mixed up depending on who's paying for the dissemination of news. On the one hand we have the review from Peter Horrocks of the BBC, who is looking at more content sharing and "sticking to what you know best" journalism and Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire is being clobbered by what he, and many others in the newspaper industry have always seen, as providing content for free. What now, with the bottom line in free-fall?
One has to remember that the BBC is a public-funded organisation, whereas Rupert Murdoch's titles are "commercial"
According to one Guardian's report, it was said that Rupert Murdoch's print portfolio is facing "the biggest challenge in their history", as it battles falling advertising revenues "to the internet" and no one to date has figured out how to make money from content that is "given away" online.
But will this work? At the conclusion of The Observer's piece on Murdoch, "...Murdoch is called The Man Who Owns the News, but if he writes a sequel, he may have to call it The Man Who Saved the News. That is an epitaph even Murdoch's most ardent admirers could not have imagined he would ever lay claim to."
So, will Murdoch's "New Deal" make him the messiah and media protector of News Corp and his media followers or a social dystopian that destroyed world news for the benefit of the haves?
According to Journalism professor Douglas Fisher, "The industry evolves to the point of small, expensive print publications and most of the 'mass' news on the web somehow. Then, as we evolve toward paid content online will come issues such as whether a certain amount of 'base' information should be free for every person — sort of like a public utility of information (perhaps presented as a social utility necessary in a functioning democratic society)."
I agree, but isn't that pure socialism? Probably, but with an inclusive social model such as Professor Fisher's, maybe it could just make the messiah immortal?
