As of this morning my old boss Rupert will be charging us to read the Times. I will therefore no longer be reading the Times. I have no objection to paying for a paper copy of the Times if I happen to want one at the corner shop, but it seems to me this is a very old-fashioned way of looking at news, media and journalism.
Before the Internet we all bought one preferred paper and read their take on everything. Over the last fifteen years we have changed our way of accessing information. We read the same story in ten different newspapers, on BBC's site and maybe a US site to get the balance of the take on it. So although Rupert's £1 a day might have been fair when we wanted one paper, I for one am not willing to pay £15 a day for the newspapers I access. Either they all need to get together and charge an information tax of some sort to access them all, or they need to come up with a new revenue model.
Of course these days with blogging, the new journalists will become people like me who, if all papers start to charge, will pay and rewrite the information free on independent sites, thus killing off the pay model before it can take hold. It's time to look to the future Rupert, not the past.
1 comment:
Rupert also needs to understand that bloggers like you and me will stop linking to articles in The Times, even if we have bought access, because we don't want our readers to run into the paywall.
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