“The prospect of the US government becoming directly involved in commercial journalism ought to be chilling to anyone who cares about free speech,” Murdoch said at a workshop on journalism in the Internet age hosted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).<\/p>\n
Warning against the “government using its heavy hand to overregulate or to subsidize us,” he said newspapers “need to a better job of persuading consumers that high quality reliable news and information does not come free.”<\/p>\n
“Good journalism is an expensive commodity,” said the 78-year-old Murdoch, who repeated his intention to begin charging readers of News Corp. newspapers on the Web.<\/p>\n
Where government does have a role, he said, is in “reducing unnecessary regulation and eliminating obstacles to growth and investment” such as a rule prohibiting ownership of a newspaper and television station in the same city.<\/p>\n
“The future of journalism is more promising than ever,” Murdoch said, although “some newspapers and some news organizations will not adapt to the digital realities and they will fail.”<\/p>\n
“The old business model based on advertising only is dead,” he said. “The business model that relies primarily on online advertising cannot sustain newspapers over the long term.<\/p>\n
“In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract readers by providing news and information they’re willing to pay for,” he said. “Quality content is not free.”<\/p>\n
“In the new business model we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our Internet sites,” Murdoch said. “We are already charging — and successfully so — for the Wall Street Journal online.<\/p>\n
“We intend to expand this pay model to all our newspapers in the News Corp. stable: the Times of London, The Australian, the rest,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Some critics say people won’t pay,” Murdoch said. “I believe they will. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing.”<\/p>\n
Without naming names, Murdoch also hit out against news aggregator sites “who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production.”<\/p>\n
“These people are not investing in journalism,” he said.<\/p>\n
“They’re feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others. To be impolite, it’s theft.”<\/p>\n
“Right now content creators bear all the costs while the aggregators enjoy many of the benefits,” he said. “In the long term this is not tenable.”<\/p>\n
Murdoch has specifically singled out Google for criticism in the past and has threatened to remove News Corp. content from the Internet powerhouse’s search engine.<\/p>\n
Murdoch is also reportedly in talks with Microsoft to make News Corp. content solely accessible through the software giant’s news search engine, Bing.<\/p>\n
FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz said the two-day workshop on “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” was being held because “journalism, at least in the traditional sense, is in trouble.”<\/p>\n
“We are living in a period of extraordinary change in which the bottom appears to be falling out of the news business,” he said.<\/p>\n