Murdoch’s Error 404 Internet Policy

January 18th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Times ErrorRupert Murdoch hates the internet. That much is indisputable: he believes it is “parasitic” and that it “steals” the intellectual property of his papers. In a way it’s difficult to blame him: the internet has completely shaken the comfortable newspaper business model, and, in the process, savaged their traditional revenue streams. However, the Parallax Brief also believes that Mr. Murdoch’s internet strategy is, to be kind, misguided and based on mistaken analysis of both the new realities facing newspapers and the internet itself.

Mr Murdoch is, in effect, the King Canute of modern media, engaged in a futile attempt to turn back the tide by will alone.

But even as News Corporation considers putting its sites behind paywalls, removing them from aggregators, and even eventually delisting from Google, it does little to actually produce products that people may want to buy — let alone to genuinely innovate or even explore some of the new opportunities offered by the internet and new hardware.

For instance, Times Online, the website for the Times and the Sunday Times, trails by some distance Guardian Unlimited, the Guardian’s and Observer’s website. Its design is aesthetically worse, it is more difficult to use, and it really represents little more than an online copy of the paper plus a few podcasts and blogs. Meantime, the Guardian has created a unique and ever expanding its online brand, with features like its brilliant Comment is Free site, its Politics A-Z encyclopedia, it’s innovative football Chalkboards, and a whole range of excellent web-only articles, features and services.

Worse, Times Online doesn’t even work. The Parallax Brief has long noted the ludicrous number of Error 404s on the site, so as an experiment he visited before writing this article world football columnist Gabriele Marcotti’s archive page, and noticed that every single  one of Mr. Marcotti’s columns linked from there led to an Error 404.

If Murdoch wants to sell access to Times Online, he had better make sure that at the very least it actually works. But this has been a problem with Times Online for ages, and nothing has been done.

And while the Guardian extends its online lead in Britain, stateside, the New York Times has invested in Adobe Air to produce a subscription version of its website. In other words, it’s making an effort, as the slick promotional video below demonstrates, to produce an electronic version of the paper people might want to buy.

Even if Murdoch doesn’t want to invest in unique content for Times Online, or build the site into a unique brand, he could at least try to present it in a way that would make people willing to buy it.

But alas, it seems that News Corp simultaneously wants to make more money from the net while doing nothing itself to actually achieve that goal. It has decided that the internet is doing bad things and that it’s going to have to be put in line: in short, it wants to change the rules to bring the old, hard copy business model to the internet. But the rules won’t change – or at least not significantly in News Corp’s favour. Indeed, the long term trend suggests strongly that hard copy newspapers will very quickly be supplanted by internet-only papers.

It’s up to News Corp to decide whether it wants the Times to exist when that happens. Because for now, while Murdoch sobs over the changes the internet as wrought, and hysterically tries to turn back the tide, rivals are extending their lead.

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Pots, Kettles, Negative Campaigning, and the Left-Right Blog Gap

January 14th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Guido Fawkes has blogged accusing Labour of going negative by picking up on the “grass roots geek campaign” of snide and comic alternatives to the Conservatives’ airbrushed David Cameron advert. He ridiculed Labour Party HQ for being “so devoid of original ideas that they have taken to stealing internet memes again.”

Well, that may be so. The Labour Party should remain aloof of such matters, and let the grass roots take care of such indecorous — if funny — activities, while perhaps providing the occasional bit of inconspicuous encouragement. It really doesn’t do Labour any favours to be seen to be at the front of a snarling, infantile pack. But Guido’s hardly the right person to be moaning about this kind of campaigning. He personally revels in his image of being the Right’s leading gadfly, and his blog was almost certainly the trailblazer for such campaigning, and is still at the vanguard. Nobody did more than Guido to bring this tabloid, viral, populist style into the British political blogosphere — an achievement of which he is openly proud.

And he is right to be proud, says the Parallax Brief. His is still the most entertaining political blog out there, and his perspicacious muckracking is bitchily underrated by a jealous printed media corps. But that also means he’s probably about as qualified to complain about this kind of thing as Kelvin MacKenzie is to decry the dumbing down of the newspaper industry.

Meantime, in the same post, Mr. Fawkes raises a penetrating point about the relative quality of the Right’s electronic presence compared to the Left’s:

The official Labour Party site is usually visited only by the party faithful. You have to push your message out. Look at what the Tories are doing, they are paying to advertise their Cameron videos on YouTube, reaching out to people who are not already signed up supporters. There are no votes to be gained from repeating your message to faithful party supporters on the official website or the party affiliated sites like LabourList and LabourHome.

Ignoring for a moment the merits of advertising on YouTube,  one thing that has always struck the Parallax Brief as odd is how much better the Right’s blogs are. If it were just a case of popularity and page traffic, then one may have been able to conjure all kinds of arguments (perhaps that it’s easier for the right to be sensationalist, or that it’s easier to blog when in opposition, or the right has better networks for promotion, or simply that right wing views are more popular.) But it goes beyond that. ConservativeHome is simply better than LabourList. There simply is no Guido fascimile of the left (thank God, they might touch and send the world supernova, or something). That’s not to say that there are no good left leaning blogs. Hopi Sen and LeftFootForward are both consistently excellent. It’s just that the general standard of content on the right is better than on the left.

If anyone can explain this, please let the Parallax Brief know.

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Has the Internet Driven Rupert Murdoch Mad?

January 14th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Yes, according to a report on the Press Gazette website (which the Parallax Brief fround via Iain Dale’s blog):

News International plans to block news aggregator NewsNow.co.uk from linking to content on all its websites, including the Sun Online and the website of the News of the World. The move follows the newspaper publisher blocking NewsNow.co.uk from linking to stories on Times Online last week.

[...]

News International spokesman told Press Gazette: “NewsNow has been using Times Online content as part of its paid-for, commercial as well as free services…  News International makes a significant investment in journalism and we believe that it is entirely appropriate for us to ask that our rights are respected.”

The Parallax Brief has long argued that Mr. Murdoch’s long term strategy to erect pay walls around his sites, and his tactics to achieve these ends, are likely the result of misguided analysis, or perhaps plain ignorance, of the new realities of the newspaper publishing industry.

But this is beyond disagreeing: it’s plain wrong. Unless, that is, News Corp wants to minimize the number of people who visit its sites.

NewsNow lists headlines under a variety of categories and allows users to link from the headline to the story on website that published it. NewsNow listing and linking TimesOnline headlines drives traffic to the Times’s website and boosts its Google PageRank by giving it more inlinks. All for free.

So, what, News Corp is going to cut off its nose to spite its face because the headlines are “its” intellectual property and NewsNow isn’t paying a royalty? That’s nothing other than ludicrous. News Corp should take the Parallax Brief’s advice and start looking for ways it can turn the internet and innovative hardware to its advantage.

Mr Murdoch may be as powerful as King Canute but he won’t be able to turn back the tide, either.

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Will Media Empires Strike Back in 2010?

January 4th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

One of the major trends in publishing over the last several years has been the slow decline of magazine and newspapers sales. In short, the industry has been savaged as evermore people stop buying papers and magazines in favour of getting their news from the internet, and online advertising and subscription payments fail to make up the difference.

The chart below, which depicts employment in the US newspaper industry over the last half century or so, shows just how hard the internet has been on this industry.

However, if the rumours the Parallax Brief hears from his tech-geek friends are true, the publishing industry may soon have a solution. Apple, which in the last decade has revolutionised the music industry through the iPod and iTunes, as well as the phone industry through the iPhone, might be about to do likewise for the publishing industry with a “tablet” style computer. Imagine something like an iPhone, but with a screen about 10 inches across, and you’re probably close to what Apple has in mind.

Watch the video below, which the Parallax Brief found on geek blog Gizmodo, to get an better vision of what potential such a device could create for the publishing industry.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Replicating the whole feel of a magazine that way might encourage people to pay small subscription fees that they’re not willing to dofor a plain text — or almost plain text — format on a phone, Kindle or via the internet. (Imagine reading an article in, say, the Economist, in which one could view embedded video, multi-media displays and charts, open up windows containing data and charts, as well as searching for more information on specific details within the text)

It would also present innovative opportunities to insert advertising. Meantime, there have also been rumours that Apple are working on deals with television companies in the US to sell TV shows direct through an Apple platform, bypassing the usual US cable networks. A tablet would also be ideal for such a system.

The Parallax Brief might be the kind of guy who snaps into a salivating trance everytime he ventures into an electronics store, but one doesn’t have to love gadgets as much as all that to see the appeal of a device on which one could comfortably view and edit documents, surf the net, monitor email accounts, watch films and TV shows, read books, and read magazines and papers in the way shown above.

It’s time for the newspaper and magazine industry to stop whining about the internet and get on with figuring out how to exploit it. New hardware can help, but only if the industry embraces it. And it would take a brave man to bet against Steve Jobs and Apple pulling off the hat trick by revolutionising the printed media industries in the same way they transformed the smart phone and music markets.

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Rupert: Bear or Toothless Tiger?

December 3rd, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

The decision by Google to allow publishers to block users linking from Google to premium content has been blown out of all proportion by the media and the blogosphere this side of the Atlantic.

Yesterday, for example, Will Straw’s Left Foot Forward blog, in article ominously (and painfully ungrammatically) titled “Google Cave into Murdoch”, wrote that the decision would “…potentially lead to an open door for other news agencies to begin charging for news content but will also be of great concern to other organisations such as the BBC which have recently been in the sights of News International.”

That’s simply not the case, and it’s worth looking beyond Murdoch’s preposterous accusations that Google “steals” and the hyperbole surrounding the decision to examine just what Google’s so-called collapse in the face of mighty bear Rupert actually involved, as well as, more importantly, just how much power Murdoch has.

First, Google News does not “steal” anything from newspapers. The headline and a tiny extract is all that is reproduced on Google. To actually read the story, one must go to the site. There is no theft involved. On the contrary, it drives traffic, and advertising revenue, to those media groups in huge quantities.

untitledWhat papers were upset about, however, was that when users clicked through to a story from Google News, they could bypass any pay-walls which might have been around that story.

And it is this which Google has agreed to solve.

So where’s the problem?

In the Parallax Brief’s not-so humble opinion, the story has been blown out of proportion basically because Murdoch has long been skeptical about the internet, and believes it robs his papers with money, which, coupled with Murdoch’s aforementioned incendiary comments and the the deep seated fear that he is somehow nefariously omnipotent, has created a buzz that he may somehow be able to take on and beat Google — and by proxy ‘The Internet’ — and spoil our brave new world for us.

But that’s simply not the case.

So what if Rupert the big scary bear withdraws his papers from Google News. His loss.

By deindexing from Google, say, Times Online, Murdoch might force ten or a hundred readers or so who ordinarily get to read Jeremy Clarkson for free to actually buy the Sunday Times or pay a subscription to Times Online; however, he’ll loose hundreds of thousands of users in return, which would have a calamitous effect on advertising revenue.

On the other hand, would Google News really be so very much worse without Murdoch? News Corporation, in terms of the English language, owns, off the top of the Parallax Brief’s head, the Sun and News of the World, the Times and Sunday Times, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Australian, a whole bunch of other yokel Aussie papers, and the Fox News and Sky News websites. Weighty, to be sure, but that lot gets absolutely drowned out by the hundreds of thousands of news sources Google News aggregates. For instance, today, on the Afghanistan troop surge, Google News groups together over 17,500 stories. Is that lot really going to be so much less informative and comprehensive because we can’t read the Times’ and Australian’s take on the story?

The argument that he could go to Bing strikes the Parallax Brief as wrong, too. It would require a tremendous investment from Microsoft to build such a system, with no real guarantee that it would work as well as Google’s service, which has had years to refine itself into the brilliant, clean, useable machine available for free now. Furthermore, Rupert would undoubtedly want a slice of the upside for going exclusive, meaning Microsoft’s profit incentive would be lower. And would the addition of, say, ten (albeit authoritative) websites really add that much of a unique selling point for Bing out of near 18,000?

The bottom line is that Murdoch may be able to bully governments, but not the internet. He’s far more likely to bend to its will than it to his, and the sooner he accepts this and turns his not inconsiderable talents to restructuring his assets for the new age, the better it’ll be for us and his shareholders.

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