News companies don't want their content "stolen"
Wed, 11/11/2009 - 8:28am
#2
I agree here - I think that,
I agree here - I think that, unless someone finds a way to make every. single. news organization go to a paid content model at the exact same time, and citizen publishing sites (like www.nowpublic.org) are taken down by some sort of communistic Internet regime, news will remain at least somewhat free/open.
Small markets might give an avenue for paid news content, but like catholicservant said, it needs to be well-written, interesting, and exciting.
Thu, 11/12/2009 - 9:30am
#3
I think Newsies probably
I think Newsies probably haven't figured out an advertising strategy that fits yet for the web. I'm sure if someone wanted to advertise in the WSJ, they are mostly worried about the print ad and not so concerned with any web advertisement. Also, if some RSS reader is just taking in their content, how do they make any advertising money. I dont know if product placement right in the content or something, but it is a sticky situation if I were to just take the New York Times RSS feed, place my own wrapper and advertisements over it and rake in money for articles I never wrote. I imagine some of that must be covered under current copyright laws, but perhaps not every use case.
Thu, 11/12/2009 - 9:38am
#4
I've noticed that, typically,
I've noticed that, typically, only 'teasers' or titles are put into the RSS feeds of most news organizations. This prevents the scheme you mention above - indeed, Catholic News Live not only receives the teaser/title, it also makes sure that, even if the full story is given in a feed, it will cut it off after about 200 words and direct people to go to the original source.
Being a good steward on the web means not stealing others' content ;-)
Mon, 05/24/2010 - 4:13pm
#5
I personally appreciate the
I personally appreciate the WSJ as a paper of record. However, I think that this kind of business thinking on the part of Murdoch and people like him shows extreme ignorance about how the internet works. Getting listed on Google, as has been mentioned, is a huge benefit.
The irony is that Google is not what he needs to worry about in terms of "stealing" content. Easily available tools can be used and are used to access pay-to-view content without paying for it. (NOTE: As a Catholic and as an ethical security practitioner, I do NOT advocate stealing content. I am just pointing out the holes that others have made.) Truth be told, I think that the idea of paying for content on the net is always going to be difficult to implement without people accessing it in unauthorized ways. And updating your robots.txt file to turn away Google crawlers is probably not going to help too much ;)
At my primary gig, for a Catholic newsie, over 30% of our inbound traffic comes from Google (yeah...a bit from Yahoo and Bing, but cmon). In this article, he disses these visitors as almost 'undesirables'. He's entitled to his opinion on that, but don't be surprised at the sudden dropoff in site visits when they cut the cord with search engines.
From my perspective...if newsies go to the closed garden model, they better step up their content. Stuff from the mainstream media is heavily biased and juvenile.
Now IF everyone...and I mean everyone went to the paid model, it MAY work. Problem is, everyone's been talking tough for years...I triple dog dare ya!
Rupert's a businessman, and a successful one at that, so he can intuitively figure some of this stuff out, but I'm not so sure he can anticipate the 'nature of the net'. Things like open source didn't pop out of a vacuum. Mac's didn't make huge market inroads because people were happy with Wintels. The net has a sort of 'evolutionary' (man I dislike what that term has become) aspect to it. Sure, News Corp could nail down something nifty and moderately successful, but things will change in a couple years...at least they have ever since the Internet age arrived.
Smaller and leaner and agile (nother horrid corpspeak term) probably has best long term prospects.
That is, unless the New World Order takes effect, the Net is socialized, and the UN police's the tubes. It could happen....... :)