QOTD

August 6, 2009 at 6:21 am PT

“We intend to charge for our news Web sites. The Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com is the world’s most successful paid news site and we will be using our profitable experience there and the resulting unique skills throughout News Corp. to increase our revenues from all our content. Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting. The increase we have seen in our Wall Street Journal subscriptions since we acquired the paper proves to me that the market is willing to pay for that quality without any special market.”

– News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch vows to charge for online content.

Tagged with: John Paczkowski, News Corp., QOTD, quoted, Rupert Murdoch, shorty

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http://allthingsd.com/ Eric Welch

Quality journalism? Like made up facts about CES, Apple and Steve Jobs? Then refusing to admit it (and do a proper correction) when plenty of witnesses were there; and clearly state what the reporter wrote was never spoken by Apple. Yep, there’s some quality journalism.

Listen to John Gruber on this. Don’t charge the readers, charge the advertisers! When I was in the newspaper industry, we were told over and over the subscription readers paid for barely covered the cost of printing and distribution. The journalism was paid for by the advertisers. What part of that scenario does Murdoch not understand? Or is he just too greedy, and now wants to charge for delivery of electrons? (Yes, bandwidth costs, but bandwidth doesn’t have a drivers’ union.)