Kill The Bloggers

YOUR NEW REALITY
Tuesday, Dec 29th, 2009

Another mainstream media story, this time from the New York Times,
pushing the new reality where news consumers will supposedly have to
soon start paying digital cash to read stories, columns and watch news
video online. I’ve been reading about this for getting onto two
years, and and it seems no closer to reality. Not much new in this story, but this final quote says it all about the biggest problem Old Media dinosaurs like Rupert Murdoch face :

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many
journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs. They should
have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they
foolishly let them out alive.”

Too many bloggers and citizen journos willing to work for free.

For paid news content to work, and to generate the kinds of profits
that media empires were once built on, the majors will have to
eliminate the competition, including thousands of non-professional
bloggers and ex-journos, who still want to keep writing, regardless of
how justly or unjustly they are compensated for their work and effort.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch could stop paying himself and his family
tens of millions of dollars a year, and eliminate one of the biggest
costs of mega-corporate media : paying the massive executive salaries
of those who don’t do any journalism any at all. Another mainstream media story, this time from the New York Times,
pushing the new reality where news consumers will supposedly have to
soon start paying digital cash to read stories, columns and watch news
video online. I’ve been reading about this for getting onto two
years, and and it seems no closer to reality. Not much new in this story, but this final quote says it all about the biggest problem Old Media dinosaurs like Rupert Murdoch face :

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many
journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs. They should
have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they
foolishly let them out alive.”

Too many bloggers and citizen journos willing to work for free.

For paid news content to work, and to generate the kinds of profits
that media empires were once built on, the majors will have to
eliminate the competition, including thousands of non-professional
bloggers and ex-journos, who still want to keep writing, regardless of
how justly or unjustly they are compensated for their work and effort.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch could stop paying himself and his family
tens of millions of dollars a year, and eliminate one of the biggest
costs of mega-corporate media : paying the massive executive salaries
of those who don’t do any journalism any at all.