From The Guardian:The billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch suffered the indignity of seeing his global empire make a huge financial loss yesterday and promptly pledged to shake up the newspaper industry by introducing charges for access to all his news websites, including the Times, the Sun and the News of the World, by next summer.Presumably that includes his US holdings as well.
Stung by a collapse in advertising revenue as the recession shredded Fleet Street's traditional business model, Murdoch declared that the era of a free-for-all in online news was over.
"Quality journalism is not cheap," said Murdoch. "The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites."
So what would you pay for a news story? A sportscast? A peek at a video? Micro-payments are the wave of the future for net use and Murdoch doesn't make many mistakes...
Will local TV stations and newspapers follow suit?
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