Its a bit rich for a member of the NewsCorp family to be going on about Piracy. Elsewhere in the family, my research into the economics of bootleg video stream aggregators in the US anime industry showed that for one site at least, MySpaceCDN servers, registered to 20th Century Fox, are their biggest pirate support bases.

These aggregators could not survive without the free video hosting provided by the likes of NewsCorp.

At bit.ly/k7P6p, I ask the question whether Rupert is picking his Hulu.com partner's pockets, or is just an Old Media Dinosaur. I tend to come down on the Dinosaur thesis.

The other day, using NY Times as the example, I posited that Google should put the newspapers out of their misery.  That Google should take the next logical step from gathering other peoples' content to creating their own authoritative reporting.  You can find the post at http://tdnyc.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/google-pay-wall/

Some other points to consider:
- Google has already become the authoritative source for some unlikely info.  For example, if you ask people to give you the latitude and longitude for a location, they will likely give you whatever Google serves up.  There used to be many directory providers with many algorithms for finding geographic center points - Google has trumped them all.

- Publishers have know for a long time that there is little distinction in the industry between creating your own content and organizing the content of others.  The entire directories business looks remarkably like Google, only Google has a fancy technology organizing and publishing the content and a fancy technology selling the ads.  Why not take that next step?

- The argument from some (like Maureen Dowd) has been that by siphoning off profits from the newspapers, Google puts journalism at risk.  Wouldn't a reasonable solution be for Google to fund the newsroom and take all of the distribution (circ) revenue for the product?

I know that the guys at Google think that this idea is stupid, but…

I feel this article is making the assertion Rupert Murdoch/News Corp invented the successful "pay wall" for WSJ when in fact, WSJ subscription model was already in place when News Corp made the acquisition.

News Corp done little or next to nothing except ride on the WSJ already established reputation.

Robert Thomson does not deserve credit which is not due…his short-term memory partisanship of the WSJ has not proven itself to be a long term success model for paid content

Tom Rosenstiel of Pew says:

“The reason the Journal’s always been able to use a pay wall is that its economic model is very different from other newspapers. Many of its readers pay for it out of business expenses, not out of their own funds.”

This statistic if often repeated by those opposed to pay walls, who wish to explain the WSJ's success as an exception that proves the rule. But is it a valid claim?

Not really.

Based on its surveys, the WSJ itself has asserted that the majority of its online subscribers are individuals who do not rely upon business expenses to cover the cost of their subscriptions.

Furthermore, even local newspaper subscriptions are often justified as business expenses. According to the NAA, nearly 40 percent of daily newspaper subscribers in 2006 were either in “Management, Business and Financial Operations,” “Professional and Related Occupations” or “Sales and Office.” You can find this at: http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Audience-Profiles.aspx

The point is that local dailies are equally valuable sources of actionable information for local business and therefore are as legitimate a business expense as the Wall Street Journal, if not more so, for people in the local coverage area.

So is the WSJ really an exception that proves the rule? Or have they actually just been more savvy at exploiting the online medium—something that any publisher could do if they invested the time and effort?

Kind regards,
Evan Rudowski
www.subhub.com