Rupert Murdoch has launched a spirited defence of putting up paywalls around his newspaper websites, while embracing the game-changing potential of Apple’s iPad. The News Corporation chairman hailed the device as a possible saviour of the newspaper industry.
Murdoch renewed his attacks on search engines, such as Google, which he accused of stealing journalism from regular media outlets. He told a US National Press Club event at George Washington University the newspaper industry had to stand up for itself and charge for content, while using copyright law to defend its journalism from being used without its permission.
”We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing … there is a law of copyright and they recognise it,” he told a packed audience of students, journalists and other media professionals.
He said search engines had tapped into a ”river of gold” by aggregating content but that the days of free news had to come to an end. ”They take [news content] for nothing. They have got this very clever business model,” Murdoch said.
In June, online versions of Murdoch’s British titles The Times and The Sunday Times will be put behind a paywall, joining the online version of his business title, The Wall Street Journal.
However, some critics say consumers are accustomed to getting online news free and will not subscribe in sufficiently large numbers to form a viable business model for quality journalism. Murdoch dismissed this fear, saying consumers could be forced to change their habits.
”When they have got nowhere else to go, they will start paying if it is reasonable. No one is going to ask for a lot of money,” he said.
Murdoch also fired a shot at The New York Times – a common bete noire of Murdoch and the WSJ’s main rival – by saying The New York Times’s own paywall plans were half-hearted and needed to be more restrictive.
”They don’t seem to be able to make up their mind,” Murdoch said.
”They will have opposition internally from some of their journalists, especially their columnists. ”To really make it work, they have got to put a paywall up. I think most newspapers in [the US] have got to have a paywall.”
Advocates of free newspaper websites often accuse Murdoch of being a technophobe but the Australian media mogul was happy to embrace the technology of Apple’s iPad tablet device, launched in the US on April 3.
During an interview with journalist Marvin Kalb, Murdoch sat with an iPad and even picked it up to demonstrate how to navigate The Wall Street Journal’s website. He said the iPad could be the saviour of newspaper journalism – in electronic form, not print.
”I got a glimpse of the future … with the Apple iPad,” Murdoch said.
”It is a wonderful thing. If you have [fewer] newspapers and more of these … it may well be the saving of the newspaper industry.”
Murdoch was also given a grilling over the conservative bias of his Fox News cable television channel.
The audience regularly tittered when Murdoch said he thought the channel had no political bias in its news coverage.
”We have both sides. We have Democrats and Republicans, Libertarians and whatever,” he said.
However, when asked to name a single Democrat-leaning Fox commentator – alongside such famous conservative names as Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly – he struggled to remember one.
”I wish I could tell you a couple of names. But they are certainly there,” Murdoch said. He eventually settled on host Greta van Susteren, whom he said was ”close” to the Democratic party.
Resource:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/murdoch-hails-ipad-as-saviour-of-news-20100412-s447.html
