In case you were in some doubt regarding the future for online news James Murdoch is telling it straight. He says that online news will in the future have a smaller audience, be less important (than broadcast) and come with a premium price tag.
James Murdoch, who is chief executive of News Corporation Europe, gives the impression that online and printed news is going to be sidelined almost by a future which the company -- he is set to lead -- is ushering in. And that is the wider reality: news outlets are being sidelined and shuttered as there is no longer any revenue to support them -- the world it seems is shrinking. We saw that this week with the closure of Media Week.
According to James Murdoch there is a role for online and print journalism, but it is not as big as that of entertainment: "In the business of ideas, which is the business that we are in, we do think journalism plays a role, and we do think there are business models there that will make a lot of sense, albeit perhaps not at the scale of some of our broadcasting businesses and other entertainment businesses.
"Is it going to be as big a role? No," he said. "Structurally, television is vastly more profitable and a big opportunity,"
Murdoch, who was speaking who was speaking at the Morgan Stanley annual Technology, Media and Telecoms Conference in Barcelona, also spoke about developing what he called a wholesale market for its digital news, which is part of its plans to erect a pay wall around its content with The Times and The Sunday Times in the UK being the first to implement this. Earlier this week Times editor James Harding said that his paper would launch a subscription service for online access early next year.
"Our digital activities -- we are going to push them harder but we are actually going to be charging a premium price for them. We will have a smaller audience than giving it away for free, but I think it is the crucial step in starting to develop a wholesale market for digital journalism," James Murdoch said.Murdoch told Reuters that his top priorities were building on News Corp's positions in pay TV in Europe and India (where it has Star TV) as well as "rebuilding the profitability of newspapers".
"We invest quite a lot in our journalism, we're very proud of it, we think it has great quality and great value, and we think that we should be charging a fair price for it, both to customers but also to other firms who might want to take it to customers in whatever way.
"We think that there's a very exciting market place, potentially a wholesale market place for digital journalism that we'll be developing," he added.
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Gordon Macmillan
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