Rupert Murdoch said last week that his newspapers are going to start charging for on-line content. Good luck with that.
Yes, the Wall Street Journal, which is part of his News Corp, has some of its content behind a pay wall. That works because the Journal provides financial information that people have to have – and that they can’t get elsewhere.
In other words, if you’re going to charge for content on the web, you need to have people who need their fix of what you’re selling. You need addicts. The successful media organization in such a world is like an entity that sells drugs or gambling. You want to be a casino.
The casino analogy applies in another way.
The news organization that have the best chance of survival are ones that are themselves already tied to casinos – that is, businesses in other, growing industries. Take the Washington Post Company. That firm includes not only the newspaper, which is losing money according to some reports, but also Kaplan Inc., the test prep company, which is very profitable. Kaplan essentially subsidizes the Post.
In contrast, the New York Times is part of a company that is almost entirely a media concern. The Times has no casino to subsidize it, so the survival of the paper is very much in doubt.
What does this mean for the future of news? Here’s my modest proposal.
Newspapers are an essential feature of a successful democracy. They can’t survive on their own. So let’s de-regulate the companies that own them. In fact, we should let newspapers own casinos.
There’s even a legal precedent for this: Indian tribes.
The tribes are exempt from many federal laws and have the right to operate casinos so they have funds to preserve their threatened way of life. Aren’t newspaper people also a dying tribe?