News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and HuffingtonPost founder Arianna Huffington duked it out Tuesday at a workshop on the future of journalism, with Murdoch arguing that news outlets must charge for online content and Huffington proclaiming that online news is destined to be free.
Who's right? Murdoch.
Sure, it would be a wonderful world - and a real utopia for news junkies - if online news sites could remain free, but they can't. Why not? Because as Murdoch pointed out at the workshop (held by the Federal Trade Commission), news isn't free.
In fact, it costs money - and lots of it - to do high-quality newsgathering. And the journalists who gather news can't work for nothing, not as long as they need food, clothing and shelter like the rest of us.
(I imagine Huffington isn't very familiar with the idea of actually paying journalists. Much of the content on HuffPo is either aggregated from other news sites that do pay their reporters, or comes from celebrity bloggers who earn their incomes elsewhere.)
Murdoch, who has said all News Corp. websites will soon charge for content, took aggregators like HuffPo to task, accusing them of nothing less than theft.
"These people are not investing in journalism," he said. "They're feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others."
If anyone should doubt him, a study released Tuesday by the Fair Syndication Consortium details just how extensive the theft of online news content is. It found that in one month, more than 75,000 unlicensed websites had reused content from U.S. newspapers, including 112,000 near-exact copies of articles.
Huffington, who's good at spouting witty one-liners, ridiculed attempts to charge for online news, saying, "We can't use an analog map to try to find solutions for a digital world."
That sounds kinda clever and hip, but like most one-liners it doesn't mean much. Nor does it speak to the central problem, which is this: Online ad revenue just isn't enough to support a news organization of any size.
Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton, speaking Tuesday at the World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, noted this very problem.
A decade ago, he said, "it was taken for granted that websites supported by advertising were the future." Today, he added, free news sites and online newspapers have one thing in common: "Virtually none is making any money."
Hinton said newspapers made the mistake of giving away their web content because "they were taken in by the game-changing gospel of the Internet age. It was a new dawn, we were told... And we just didn't get it. Like an over-eager middle-aged dad, desperate to look cool, we ended up dancing obediently to other people's tunes."
Read The Era of Free News on the Web Is Ending.
Rupert Murdoch photo courtesy Getty Images
Follow me on Facebook & Twitter
Comments
I see. So free news online would be illegal. Just like free movie downloads and, for that matter, crack and weed.
The genie is out of the bottle. Us news types had better get used to that.
Everything costs something. Somebody has to pay for experienced journalists to do their jobs, and to do them well.
I can’t imagine anyone would have a problem with paying for news they regularly read. Ariana Huffington’s a fruitcake, but then, she IS a millionaire. She’s not sharing her bucks with the people who report and write news.