ANALYSIS:COULD THE Antichrist save us – again? Newspaper people all over the world may well pose this question after Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corporation and grizzled veteran of a dozen to-the-death business battles, finally came clean on charging for online news.
The mogul made his announcement in New York yesterday, offsetting the group’s dire financial results. He said he wanted to make people pay for access to his news websites by next June – although he didn’t provide details.
It appears that all the newspapers and broadcasters within News Corp – media platforms, to use the jargon – will be looking for credit card details when net surfers land on their shores. The Sun, Times of London, News of the World, the New York Post, papers across Australia, will take the plunge, watched by hundreds of nervous- nelly newspaper proprietors elsewhere. Making money out of online publication has been the big question that has had media heads aching since it became apparent that the print newspaper is in decline.
Only a few papers internationally persisted in charging for online content. Now the tide is turning – again – as the hope that online advertising would make the profits once accumulated by print ads has evaporated.
(The Wall Street Journal, owned by Murdoch since 2007, does charge for most of its content, though readers can pick up a few stories before the encryption curtain comes down.)
Murmurs and rumours about the News Corp move have been in the media-sphere for some time, as has anguished hand-wringing about how newspapers would survive in the online world.
Now Murdoch has taken the bull by the horns and the decision by such a huge organisation will encourage others to do the same. Of course, this move can only work if others do follow suit – a public accustomed to not paying for its online news will easily flit to other sites covering similar territory.
One thing his many detractors cannot pin on Murdoch is cowardice. He rattled the chains of the British media establishment when, as a relatively young man, he transformed the Sunfrom a dowdy broadsheet into the super soaraway bosom-bedecked tabloid that sold millions. But it was in the mid-1980s that Murdoch really achieved his horns and tail, when he set up the printing plant at Wapping, east London, to print titles without the mighty Fleet Street print unions.
For months afterwards there was near-war on Wapping’s streets, as police and security guards ushered staff into the plant, behind barbed wire, with a furious crowd of picketing ex-printers baying for blood.
The bold move – which saved the newspapers concerned – added to Murdoch’s reputation as a ruthless right-winger interested only in profits and not in the role of newspapers as a means to improve society.
Working for a Murdoch paper in the late 1980s, it was almost comical to hear the invective at dinner parties. “How could you? He’s bringing down civilisation as we know it, with those comics!” were typical of the comments.
The man himself, on occasional visits to the office where I worked, looked less than Mephistophelean, wearing carpet slippers and an apparently hand-knitted old cardigan.
The consideration missing from all this outrage is that newspapers are a business. For those who know and love them, that has always been part of the delicious tension of the press: news should be produced ethically and accurately, but the product also has to sell.
Finding that magic territory, where the reader is engaged and impressed by what the journalists provide, is the challenge. And, gathering and producing news costs money. Murdoch, in his conference call with analysts yesterday, said: “Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting.”
Do people still want good reporting? These days there is a plethora of "news" sources online, from the one you might be reading to the Huffington Post, the leading US aggregator, to the BBC's vast output, to the ramblings of bloggers who believe they have the real handle on what is going on. Much of the news content out there is derived from a few professional operations that have practised quality journalism – finding the stories that people didn't want published, doing the background, making the calls, getting everything as right as it possibly can be.
There are two major trends in newspaper markets: firstly, that the news has migrated online; secondly, that young people just don’t read newspapers any more.
They go to their specialised websites for news on celebrities, music, sport – but the habit of flicking through the pages of an intelligent, responsible paper to find out what’s been going on, to keep an eye on the politicians and to have a laugh, is a 20th-century one. Even three years ago, Jeffrey Cole, of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, observed: “If there were a nationwide newspaper strike in the US, almost nobody under the age of 30 would even notice.”
However, we as citizens and humans still need news – vitally. The classic definition of a newspaper is that it “exists in constant tension with the government of the day”. Or, more colloquially, to keep the bastards honest. And then, all human life is there, on your breakfast table.
The immediate reaction (online, of course) to Murdoch’s declaration ranged from an apparent willingness to pay “a tenner a year” for his wares, to splutterings at the very thought of being asked to pay for “Murdoch rubbish”.
Henry Porter, former News Corp journalist, now London editor of Vanity Fair, would criticise many Murdoch outlets (the loathsome Fox News for instance) but he did concede, in 1999: "Murdoch reads the market better than anyone."
Rupert, you might just have done it again. Or you might be a crazy old man who thinks he can roll back the waves of history because he’s never failed before.
Angela Long is a freelance journalist and lecturer. She is currently completing a dissertation comparing online and paper news.