Thursday, February 4, 2010

Not that anyone cares, but ...

I'm going to post something new here.

The great 'paying for content' debate carries on.  The latest salvos come from the animated corpse of Rupert Murdoch, and anyone else in the newspaper industry who thinks the world owes them a living.

Frankly, I'm getting a bit sick of it.  The two big arguments are:
  1. Readers should pay more for news.
  2. You'll be sorry when we're gone.
In response to one I would observe that readers do pay for news - with their time and attention.  Historically the newspapers have monetized that by selling advertising, unfortunately (for them) advertising rates for newspapers are way down from historical levels.  They can monetize this on the web, but current rates are well below what news organizations have come to expect.

In response to the second point I can only say good riddance.

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