There’s plenty going on Media Land today, with a major game-changing move coming from Mr Big Himself, Rupert
No free lunch from next year.
Murdoch.
He has announced that all his news websites, including The Times, The Sun and the News of the World, will charge for access by the middle of next year. The Wall Street Journal already charges for access.
Read this analysis of the move by The Spectator.
This comes directly after his company, News Corporation, released its annual results and reported a net loss of 3.4 billion dollars. In the previous year, the company posted a net profit of 5.4 billion dollars. This is partly because of the acquistion of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal but also because the fall in ad revenue that has hit everybody throughout the world.
Now don’t say I didn’t tell you about news websites getting ready to charge for access. Click here to read my Moneyweb column of two weeks ago: “Set it free and if readers come back to you, make ‘em pay”.
And also in SA, Herman Lategan has written a great piece for The Media Online about the dearth of decent TV critics based on his time as a writer and publicist for e.tv. How’s this for an indictment of our TV critics:
One young TV writer once told me without any shame that he had not read a book in years. Another claimed proudly that she thought The Da Vinci Code was top-notch literature, which had shaped her specific style of writing. I wanted to say: “And it shows, dear heart.”
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