The more I hear about his planned Operation Paywall the more I think that, great as he is, the guy is a grifter.
Remember the London Post? No, of course you don’t. Rupert’s vaunted national evening paper never existed, except as a brilliant ‘playwall’ behind which he constructed a weapon which resisted months of siege and won Britain’s greatest publishing war: Fortress Wapping.
For three months I was Assistant Editor (Day Desk) on project leader Charlie Wilson’s Newspaper That Would Never Be; I spent all that time in the USA on a ‘no-expense-spared, go anywhere’ mission to learn how American journalists produced newspapers using computers instead of glue-pots and Biros.
For me, the fairy story ended unhappily with one of those in-yer-face, “Shut the fuck up!” sessions with the unlikely Times editor after I demanded once too often to be allowed home to draw up a dummy and begin hiring production staff if (as I believed was the ‘plan’) we were to launch by October, 1985.
Of course, history has since taught us that the London Post launch, towards which I was working so hard, was Rupert’s equivalent of Churchill’s pre-D-Day inflatable tanks and balsa wood aircraft: Murdoch’s Operation Overlord was a scam designed to fool the battalions of bully-boy print unions.
And me.
Now, I have a horrible feeling he’s doing it again. The Boss (none of his ex-senior execs ever breaks the habit of calling him that) boasted to the world recently that he is determined to withdraw all of News Limited’s titles from Google as soon as he finds a way to erect his paywall.
No sooner was Sky carrying the Master and Commander’s words to the corners of the known world than one of his senior lieutenants, Times editor James Harding, outlined to the Society of Editors how his title planned to start charging a subscription for digital content in the spring.
It went down well inside the conference. A lot of mealier mouths than Murdoch’s are eager for the Citizen Paywall to dump Google, shut off the free news supply and . . . kerrching! A dozen and more digital Daily Deadlosses hit pay dirt again, and the advertisers can go to the devil.
But Keith Rupert Murdoch is an old newsprint man. As Matthew Norman recently noted in the Independent, “for a split second [during his Sky ‘paywall’ interview] Rupert was clearly bamboozled by the admittedly recherché term ‘online’. He doesn't speak the lingo at all, and barely understands it.”
He’s wily, of course. I have been monitoring recent US press comment (via free internet, of course) regarding the news paywall issue, and I’m certain Rupert does the same.
If so, he’ll know that almost universal media opinion across the land that gave us pay-per-view is that paywalls work fine where content is unimpeachably exclusive: The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and The Financial Times are proof of that. So, for that matter, is Sky Sports.
But what about the New York Times? The Grey Lady aches to re-erect the paywall it abandoned in 2007 after a two-year trial produced minimal uptake and only about £5million in annual revenue. What it DID succeed in doing was to induce bloggers to plunder almost at will its resources for public benefit.
Now, with its free-to-all online approach pulling in a steady, if unspectacular, ad revenue the NYT is America’s most popular online newspaper website with 18million unique visitors per month.
We might, in fact, all have been too easily fooled by Rupert’s apparent infatuation for the idea of ring fencing his internet newspaper properties for a king’s ransom.
Maybe The Boss isn’t so much in love with the internet as at war with it. Perhaps his loathing is directed at the content-plundering Google, which offers no direct return for his well-financed journalism. Could it be that he will eventually settle for a simple slice of the internet action in order to buy time for his precious, but declining print media?
James Harding may be simply following in the footsteps of the non-existent London Post’s Assistant Editor (Day Desk) who once swanned off across the Pond with a pocketful of expenses and a head full of nonsense.
Which Rupert Murdoch will the New Year bring? Prince of Paywalls? Or King of Conmen?
First published in Press Gazette, December 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment