Receiving news almost exclusively via digital media is a prime example of the advancements in technology today. However, paying a staff, embedding video in web pages and developing slide shows is not free. Rupert Murdoch and his company News Corporation are about to make a bold move. They want to make users pay for their news content and eliminate the visibility of the entire website to non-paying customers, minus the homepage. Indeed, the company is aiming to take back the right to charge for superior news content.
While The Financial Times is the first to take the bold step of charging for news content, there are others waiting in the wings. For instance, The New York Times is planning something similar sometime in 2011 and will undoubtedly take a keen interest in these developments. While these companies are planning to overhaul their web designs to entice customers, it remains to be seen if users will willingly pay for news content when providers such as Google are offering their news for free.
Google however is simply sending their “spiders” out to crawl around the web and bring back sometimes hundreds of versions of the same article. They aren’t lending anything new to the story, as The Financial Times does and will continue to do with their pay format. They intend to bring only the most important stories, explained simply by their own talented journalists.
In truth, many people believe we should be paying for our news. A publication like The Financial Times not only has a very talented staff of writers, but their publication is an intricate assembly of images that stand alone or are linked from videos. There are many features on the site with multimedia slide shows. Also, to have interactive graphics on display (charged by Flash) is simply not a cost that can be absorbed by management to be presented to a non-paying public