“We intend to charge for our news Web sites. The Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com is the world’s most successful paid news site and we will be using our profitable experience there and the resulting unique skills throughout News Corp. to increase our revenues from all our content. Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting. The increase we have seen in our Wall Street Journal subscriptions since we acquired the paper proves to me that the market is willing to pay for that quality without any special market.”
Quality journalism? Like made up facts about CES, Apple and Steve Jobs? Then refusing to admit it (and do a proper correction) when plenty of witnesses were there; and clearly state what the reporter wrote was never spoken by Apple. Yep, there’s some quality journalism.
Listen to John Gruber on this. Don’t charge the readers, charge the advertisers! When I was in the newspaper industry, we were told over and over the subscription readers paid for barely covered the cost of printing and distribution. The journalism was paid for by the advertisers. What part of that scenario does Murdoch not understand? Or is he just too greedy, and now wants to charge for delivery of electrons? (Yes, bandwidth costs, but bandwidth doesn’t have a drivers’ union.)
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size. 11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Comments
Quality journalism? Like made up facts about CES, Apple and Steve Jobs? Then refusing to admit it (and do a proper correction) when plenty of witnesses were there; and clearly state what the reporter wrote was never spoken by Apple. Yep, there’s some quality journalism.
Listen to John Gruber on this. Don’t charge the readers, charge the advertisers! When I was in the newspaper industry, we were told over and over the subscription readers paid for barely covered the cost of printing and distribution. The journalism was paid for by the advertisers. What part of that scenario does Murdoch not understand? Or is he just too greedy, and now wants to charge for delivery of electrons? (Yes, bandwidth costs, but bandwidth doesn’t have a drivers’ union.)
Posted by Eric Welch at August 6th, 2009 at 8:05 am