The whole earnest MSM discussion is based on the idea that news is a commodity, and corporate interests can obtain proprietary rights. It's a ridiculous notion if you actually step back and think about it but hardly anyone does. The belief that everything is a commodity is too deeply engrained in our culture.

Of course the corporations no longer report the news anyway. People still tend to distinguish news from opinion but most of the stuff in the media is neither. It's 'interpretation' - not what happened but what it means. Things are never what they seem in MSM world; events always require explanation by those smug faces who know what's REALLY going on. Events can only be understood by reference to their implications for the next election or someone's leadership ambitions; they are never worth reporting just for the sake of it but only as part of some broader narrative that the journalist has concocted.

Most of it is speculative bullshit of course but that's what Murdoch and company think of when they talk about 'news'.

Ken hits it on the head. It's all about narratives and god help those of us who can't be comfortable with their version of one.
For us the big test is the ABC.
If the ABC is dragged into charging, then there is a problem.
And given the ideological closeness between MSM and New Labor ( whatever the extraneous spats ), that could be still on the cards. The new government has been remiss in clearing the Shier/Alston era deadwood who follow the party line on dumbing down.
To tell from the evolution of the public broadcasting the last couple of years, you'd hardly think there'd been a change of government.

"The belief that everything is a commodity is too deeply engrained in our culture."

Whose culture?

The internet is a news consumer's paradise and a news producer's nightmare if you apply market logic. But to the extent that online news consumption can be considered a culture, it's not believed to be a commodity at all.

The scarcity that increases market value and makes private property worthwhile in meatworld is reversed online, where stuff accumulates value the more it's passed around. That's the basis of the whole viral marketing thing.

Funny how the king of news hounds seem to have missed that.

Paul,
If the ABC started charging for online access they'd have to square that with public funding. We're already paying 10c a day, or whatever it is now.

Ideological bents aside, you'd have a situation where the ABC was the primary news source for everyone. There'd be even more emphasis on the public service aspect of news. Things would have to get pretty dire before an Australian government of any kind would mess with that. It would pale beside Conroy's censorship efforts.

Truth is of course Murdoch and company are p***ing in the wind. If they retreat behind paywalls, other entrepreneurs that don't have the enormous overheads of the MSM dinosaurs will quickly develop alternative business models.

Clearly he hasn't learned a thing from the painful efforts of the music companies to preserve music as a commodity. Which means Lyn I was too broadbrush when I referred to 'our culture'; what I meant was 'the traditional capitalist culture'. Clearly a new culture is emerging where lots of things like news and music won't be proprietary commodities any more, but the behemoths are incapable of getting their heads around such a revolutionary idea. All they can think of is taking Michael Jackson on another world tour even if he's in a coffin, and screaming at Tom Clancy or Stephen King to for heaven's sake produce another piece of formulaic crap for the book trade.

Meanwhile a new generation is growing up for whom information and entertainment exist in cyberspace and are freely available to all. People spend hours and hours on Facebook or blogs, doing stuff that used to be called 'making your own fun' before we all got seduced with shiny toys you can buy for money. Making your own fun for free? No wonder Murdoch and company are tearing their hair out - it flies in the face of everything that has happened under market capitalism over the last 100 years.

"I was too broadbrush when I referred to 'our culture'; what I meant was 'the traditional capitalist culture'"

I figured that around about the time I pressed the 'post' button.

"People spend hours and hours on Facebook or blogs, doing stuff that used to be called 'making your own fun' before we all got seduced with shiny toys you can buy for money.'"

I think I will misappropriate that.

The technology to demand payment for access is here and it works. However, that technology by itself does not persuade the audience to pay.Will the public pay? How many will pay? What will the advertisers do when the number of readers drop?

Murdoch, is setting the agenda and shaping the debate on this. Other publishers are falling into step behind him. However, he strikes me as a traditionalist publisher trying to graft an old-fashioned print business model onto the internet. He is not exploring new ways of engaging in journalism in a digital era. I would pay for content that I really needed for my blogging, but mainstream news site currently offer me very little. News Corp., for one, has very little, if any, content that is specialist enough for me---including their op-ed columnists.

The paywall issue was addressed by Wired editor-in chief-Chris Anderson, when kicking off his magazine’s recent Disruptive By Design conference. He came up with the following rules for media companies trying to figure out how to make money online:

1.The best model is a mix of free and paid
2.You can’t charge for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere,
3.Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site,
4.Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, the narrower the niche the better.

I'm with Anderson here in that this is how I think it will go.It will be along the lines of give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games.Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa.

As Anderson points out:

newspaper and magazine publishers don't charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They're not selling papers and magazines to readers, they're selling readers to advertisers. It's a three-way market... A typical online site follows the 1 Percent Rule — 1 percent of users support all the rest. In the freemium model, that means for every user who pays for the premium version of the site, 99 others get the basic free version. The reason this works is that the cost of serving the 99 percent is close enough to zero to call it nothing.

Will Murdoch settle for niche content and small audiences?

Gary,
We haven't seen the end of the advertising industry resettling yet. The classifieds are gone, but the big end of the industry is still catching up.

You've got advertisers slowly realising that the media industry model has been ripping them off, and audiences realising their own clout (Kyle and Jackie O?). Advertisers are apparently pulling out of Fox News, because they're realising audiences aren't necessarily there because they love the content.

That has ramifications for the four paywall rules. Particularly for a news media industry that has no idea what people will pay for. So I think Ken's right that the next media producers will be a whole new bunch of entrepreneurs without the overheads. Probably working in some kind of cooperative network, if indications so far are any guide.

1. Agreed about the ABC. If they don't charge for content from their own employees, and other free news services (BBC, NZBC, Xinghua, etc), whatever CreativeCommons journalism/blogging is available, as well as the media releases that are a major news source, then that's ok.

2. If the various "Aunties" across the world either charge ONLY for Murdoch and paywall-sourced news/opinion - no great loss.

3. If the "Aunties" do not source from behind the paywall of Murdoch and others, then the world would be a better place, because the plebs disinterested enough in news to NOT pay for it wouldn't be fed as much spin.

Dave,
If you take media releases out of the equation, since the ABC gets them, and wire stuff that comes through Reuters which won't be paywalled, what else is in newspapers?

Opinion and Liberal Party gossip. The latter is the only thing we can't already get elsewhere, and as you said at 2, no great loss.

I'm trying to imagine the world without newspapers, but the more I think about it, it's the world with newspapers that's illogical.

Chris Anderson, Wired editor-in chief, says in his talk---Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business--- at the Disruptive By Design that in the:

digital realm ... the main feedstocks of the information economy — storage, processing power, and bandwidth—are getting cheaper by the day. Two of the main scarcity functions of traditional economics-the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution—are rushing headlong to zip.

For Anderson free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly.

I'm sure that Murdoch would say that Chris Anderson's big idea is to charge nothing for everything-- its the standard crazy techno-utopianism from Californian libertarianism. Dr Pangloss is alive and well and living in California. For Murdoch Amderson is proposing that The Australian should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels!

Murdoch has a point though: Amazon and Google want the information from publishers to be free, because that way they make more money. In Priced to Sell:Is free the future? in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell spells out what this means:

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.”

Murdoch would not like that kind of business model at all as he is used to calling the shots. However, he cannot afford to buy Amazon or Google.He's old media and is forced to adjust to lower income streams.