Jonna Dagliden
Next summer Murdoch will start charging for web news. But will readers cough up?
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has finally answered the question we all have posed this year: when and where will we have to start paying for online news? “Next summer,” he finally told the Guardian today.
Speculation has been rife on whether charging for online content would be the final solution for newspapers who are struggling to survive. Writing in the June issue of Prospect, Damian Tambini warned that the idea is part of a general shift in the way we are able to access the internet. “It will limit both competition and citizens’ ability to access freely the internet’s treasure trove,” he wrote, adding: “Openness doesn’t just guarantee free speech, it also partly explains recent unprecedented levels of innovation.”
However, it remains to be seen whether Murdoch’s wheeze is workable. Can newspapers take back what readers have become used to consuming for free? Murdoch has said that Newscorp will start charging for news from both the broadsheets and tabloids such as the Sun, celebrity news being of special interest. “When we have a celebrity scoop, the number of hits we get now are astronomical,” he told Guardian. But whether readers will think it’s actually worth shelling out for such scoops when they can now pick up several freesheets full of gossip daily is another question all together.
Brian Semple
Chris Anderson: a "professional exaggerator"?
Chris Anderson knows a thing or two about self-promotion. His first book, The Long Tail, caused a stir three years ago in its suggestion that the internet was creating a golden age for niche retailers. His latest work, Free: the Future of a Radical Price (which like The Long Tail began as a Wired article and was developed on Anderson’s blog) makes an equally sweeping claim – to plug the gap in economic thought that arises from the disappearance of prices.
However, in a review in the new August edition of Prospect, William Davies suggests that the answers Anderson provides to this problem are really little more than an extension of already existing economic models, such as Moore’s law (which predicted in 1965 that the cost of computer processing would halve every two years). Davies also crticises Anderson for being enthralled to Google, Free sometimes feeling “less like a glimpse of the future than a reverential analysis of a business model dreamt up 15 years ago”.
Still, Davies acknowledges that Anderson does have a point, if also a repetitive and slightly disingenuous way of making it. What does Free mean for the Rupert Murdochs of this world? Let us know your thoughts below.
Tom Chatfield
Wiping the smile off Rupe's face…
Two of our reviews are free to read online this month. In the first, I join the ranks of those writing about Roberto Bolaño’s Latin American epic 2666: a 900-page monster of a text that appeared in Spanish in 2003 and that has been trailing clouds of glory towards the English-speaking world ever since—a momentum that has if anything been enhanced by the tragic death of Bolaño himself, in 2003. It’s a mad, tremendous book; as much as anything, though, I was fascinated by the force of its critical reception, and why such a wild and demanding work should have hit such “a masochistic sweet spot in modern sensibilities.”
Secondly, we at Prospect were delighted to give a home to Kim Fletcher’s wry take on Michael Wolff’s equally wry biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. Originally written for the Telegraph, the piece failed to see the light of day there—perhaps because it cuts a little too close to the tender bones of the newspaper profession—but it’s a loving dissection of Wolff’s strategy. As Fletcher puts it, “Wolff does one of those things that journalists can still do. He speaks truth to power. At least, he speaks the truth as identified by a smartypants liberal New York writer.” Murdoch and his variously mocked hench-people have, one gathers, taken a rather different view of the matter.
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