Two stalwarts of the financially beleaguered news publishing industry, Associated Press CEO Tom Curley and News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch, this week said the days of free news would soon end just like the era of the free lunch. They initially want money from search companies like Google and ultimately from consumers who read the news on their Web sites.
They were speaking at the World Media Summit in Beijing. We report this to state the obvious: If movie theaters close their ticket booths by making movies available online for free, viewership will increase but revenue won’t be sufficient to finance the multimillion-dollar productions that consumers love. Likewise, if the networks provide commercial-free channels online, many people will switch from the channels with ads to the online ones that don’t.
Curley said content creators such as the AP have been “too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission.” Google, of course, has made billions by indexing sites like the AP’s and News Corp.’s and then providing consumers links to specific stories. Google reaps most of the revenue.
“We will no longer tolerate the [financial] disconnect between people who devote themselves – at great human and economic cost – to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it,” Curley said. He called aggregators like Google and Yahoo “content kleptomaniacs.”
The AP will have to make major changes to its policies if it is to meet Curley’s goals. It’ll have to cancel its current licenses for stories and photographs to the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN. It will also have to block Google and other search engines from indexing its sites, something that Google says can be easily done.
The AP previously said that it, News Corp and nine newspapers would deploy News Registry, which looks for unauthorized use of its content. Testing of the news registry is to begin by year-end. It’ll also deploy a service called AP3P for Protect, Point and Pay that a) protects published news content against unauthorized use, b) aggregates and indexes published news content and c) provide licensing models for new content that support the payment models that individual publishers use.
The AP, which is owned by a number of newspapers, expects its revenue to decline from $748 million in 2008 to $700 million this year. Murdoch previously said his company would begin charging to access all of its news sites. Its Wall Street Journal is the largest pay-to-view Internet news site with more than 1 million customers. He also said users of smartphones like BlackBerrys and iPhones will soon have to pay $2 a week to access the Wall Street Journal Web site.