by Paul Alan Levy
The New York Times carries a story today about prospects for the news industry to obtain a revenue stream to support its content by erecting pay walls around their content. Rupert Murdoch, who has long proclaimed his intention to establish a pay wall for all his papers (as he now has for the Wall Street Journal) is said to be trying to strike a deal with a search engine (apparently Microsoft’s Bing) whereby that one search engine would be given exclusive access to crawl its various sites and include their contents in its search results. Apparently, no one news entity wants to go first with pay walls, because the pay walls do not provide enough revenue to have a substantial impact on their profit picture, and each entity fears that others will continue to provide free content and readers (and hence advertising dollars) will go elsewhere.
Alan Mutter is quoted at the end of the story as offering this tongue-in-cheek diagnosis: “One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs . . . They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”
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