Model of success?
• The Wall Street Journal went online in 1996.
• Annual subscription to WSJ.com runs $119.
• Main articles are available to the public, but specialized content is by subscription only.
Published 20:09, May the 12th, 2009
Online news: Who’s right?
Can newspapers charge for digital content? Murdoch thinks so; Huffington scoffs
When Rupert Murdoch announced that his daily papers would be charging for online content within a year, the news-reading community couldn’t help but listen attentively.
The media tycoon owns The Wall Street Journal; the New York Post; U.K.’s The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times. If anyone can change the face of the newspaper industry, it would be Murdoch.
Still, Arianna Huffington — an online news celebrity in her own right — yesterday disagreed. In an editorial in British newspaper The Guardian, Huffington explained why media outlets will never be able to return news content behind their walled gardens: “We’ve seen that movie — and consumers gave it lousy reviews.”
Huffington is right: The pay-for-content model has already been attempted, and largely failed. Of course, a pre-Murdoch WSJ has been the most successful, to date, at charging online readers for specialized content. And Huffington has a personal stake in ensuring the failure of traditional newspapers and the rise of the Internet as the news medium du jour — her Huffington Post blog is among the most successful of its own ilk. That is not to say the Murdoch’s vision isn’t flawed itself.
“We’re starting to see holes where newspapers were,” says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. “The question is, will new Web sites fill the holes, will traditional names come in — or will they just not get filled?"