Murdoch plans to charge for online content

The Guardian today reported that Rupert Murdoch is planning to make the websites for his Times and Sun newspapers, and no doubt his foreign titles as well, a paid-for resource rather than a free one at present. This comes after his empire suffered a £2bn loss for the financial year to June 2009. He is considering doing it this financial year and expects to be followed by other online news providers.

However, this has already been tried: the Independent put its comment content, and much of its back catalogue, behind a paywall for a few years but went back on this; the New York Times has also tried paywalling and failed. The Independent was already the weakest of the four "quality" English dailies and its opinion columns were far less interesting than those of the Guardian, for example. Since online content thrives on open debate, anyone writing a column for only a paying audience necessarily limits their reach. Anyone who wants to discuss an issue arising out of an opinion piece in the Times will have to copy the entire article, or much more than they would otherwise have done, defeating the object of the paywall, or just not bother. The Times is the weaker of the two right-leaning "qualities" and its comment has a kind of neo-conservative, pro-American slant (unlike the Telegraph, which was the first paper to have a comprehensive online service, which is more middle-England and "old Tory").

Jeff Jarvis notes that this move opens the door to free competition and deprives the articles of "link value":

Newspapers have had 15 years since the launch of the internet browser to reimagine and rebuild themselves for the reality of the post-Gutenberg age. But they didn't. Now they are trying to reclaim old business models for a new media economy — a link economy, I call it, in which links give content value. Cut yourself off from links, behind pay walls, and you cut yourself off from the internet and its real value.

This is totally true in terms that paywalling stifles debate, and that links are of value because for comment pieces, they are of limited value if they cannot be debated. However, link value doesn't equal costs recovered, particularly when there is an advertising slump.