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News Corp.: We're
walling off our news

Change will happen sometime over the next fiscal year

By Diego Vasquez
Aug 6, 2009

If Rupert Murdoch gets his way, and he usually does, internet surfers will no longer be getting something for nothing from the vast majority of News Corp.’s web sites.

The company chairman and chief executive officer said as much yesterday during an earnings call with investors.

Though Murdoch has been cheerleading the paid content model for online newspapers for some time, his comments yesterday seemed to go beyond papers to all of News Corp.’s news content, including sites for Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network.

“We intend to charge for all news sites,” Murdoch said.

Online editions of the London Sun, New York Post and News of the World, as well as other News Corp. papers, will begin to charge for content this fiscal year, Murdoch said, though he did not detail how those charges will be implemented or how high they’ll be.

Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal already charges for content and did so long before it was acquired by News Corp. in 2007.

But even WSJ.com will get some changes. The company is mulling a micropayments system that would allow users to access Journal content on an article-to-article or perhaps month-to-month basis rather than paying for a full-year subscription.

Murdoch told investors yesterday that “quality journalism is not cheap.” News Corp.’s pursuance of a paid model has also been accelerated by the decline in newspaper advertising.

During second quarter, News Corp.’s fiscal fourth quarter, operating profits in the company’s newspaper division declined by more than 60 percent.

News Corp. is hardly the only big newspaper company considering a move to a paid online model, despite the fact that only a handful of papers, including the Journal and the Financial Times, have pulled it off.

The New York Times, Media News and others have floated the idea of switching to paid or partially paid sites, as circulation and advertising revenue continue to plummet across the industry.

Diego Vasquez is a staff writer for Media Life.	© 2010 Media Life Magazine

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