Quickthink

this photo of Mr. Murdoch is from Poynter OnLine

A few of the great and mighty are getting grumpy. They run traditional media outlets (like Rupert Murdoch, who just bought WSJ for a lot of money), and these outlets are in trouble. Ad revenue is down, and they think it is Google’s fault.  So Murdoch and a few others are starting to attack Google and other aggregators as “parasites”.  They argue that aggregators let people get their great content without paying enough.

AP is making the same grumbling noises— and is threatening to take steps to protect its “interests” from aggregators.

Nice argument. But it won’t work. I use aggregators all the time. I love aggregators because they give me a lot more than WSJ or any single outlet can.Especially access to a lot of arguments — new ideas — different points of view. And better yet, from time to time, I comment on a flow of that argument. I get to play too.

Rupert my friend, WSJ never did that and never will. And that is your real problem. It’s like the piccolo player trying to shut down the orchestra.

FOLLOW - Perhaps Mr. Murdoch should take a look at Steve Crocker’s pieceabout how “RFC’s” evolved that led to the evolution of the internet. Steve makes this great point 

… we always tried to design each new protocol to be both useful in its own right and a building block available to others. We did not think of protocols as finished products, and we deliberately exposed the internal architecture to make it easy for others to gain a foothold. This was the antithesis of the attitude of the old telephone networks, which actively discouraged any additions or uses they had not sanctioned.

J’accuse! It’s this simple. You, Mr. Murdoch don’t want others to get a foothold.

2d FOLLOW - So what about AP? I think Larry Digman at ZDNet exposes the AP threat for what it is — hot air. Larry points out that about all AP does is squeeze out a headline from other original content, without providing links to the sources. So …. anyone can go to the sources themselves. And just what value does AP provide? Close to zero.

3rd FOLLOW - NYT reports that charging fees for news might be possible if news can be branded as a “value added” proposition.  After all, people do pay for bottled water. But this means changing the business model from providing “general interest news” to chasing “best in our niche” writing. I agree. Just look at NYT now, where it offers articles in many areas, but the articles are rarely the best around in that niche. Moreover, commenting to the articles does not generate community building. Two strikes against NYT niche building potential.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 8:41 am and is filed under Business models. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.