And I think Murdoch is going to go down the same lines with his other brands.

He's clueless about online, but he's bloody good at selling packages – see Sky TV…

Sure there are a few sources of original quality news remaining – in English, The BBC, The New York Times and The Economist come to mind. But even the quality sources of news are multiple – and to the extent one of them remains “free” (ad or non-profit foundation supported), there won’t be sufficient scarcity to support the paid content model on the web. That is just plain economics.

While Wall Street Journal is one of the pioneers of paid content on the web, financial news is, and will remain, a niche. In some areas, local news could possibly be funded by a paid model but even there, is the quality sufficient to drive demand? I doubt it.

In Italy, one publisher has suggested a tax on Internet connections to fund news sources. While that does seem to be an easy solution for publishers, it unfairly penalizes the vast number of people who aren’t interested in subsidizing the vast numbers of dubious “quality” news sources out there, Murdoch’s own US Fox “News” topping my list.

When?

Grant you, I do think that a good deal of what Mr. Murdoch has said in this interview has been taken out of context, but I am surprised at how both Mr. Murdoch and other senior media executives have a hard time expressing how it is that they're going to make money effectively in today's online publishing environment. They express ideas that sometimes are either not in sync with what is actually achievable in an online environment or seem to wish away fundamental premises of economics and law.

I have no doubt that there will be increased efforts to provide paid access to content from major media organisations; some of those efforts are long overdue and probably necessary and, if implemented properly, welcome efforts to build more effective business models. But for heaven's sake, please get some management in place that can express these ideas clearly to the public and to investors.

Sincerely,
John Blossom
President
Shore Communications Inc.

Instead of calling aggregators names, news publishers should be working together to develop an open model for syndicating content and thereby creating a new marketplace for the next generation of news apps to emerge.

If the big publishers start doing what the record labels are doing right now, and begin licencing news aggregators to resell their premium content for flat monthly fees, I believe we will see an explosion of new models for enhancing the news experience. This will save and grow the industry into the future.

The lesson from the music industry is for publishers to not try and solve the problem themselves, but create a marketplace for the web entrepreneurs to innovate and solve the problem organically for them.