Newshoggers Archive: Rupert Murdoch VS The Internet

Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.

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Friday, October 2, 2009

Rupert Murdoch VS The Internet

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Although most pay for content internet models have failed and been abandoned that's exactly what Rupert Murdoch plans to do. This interesting piece in Vanity Fair attempts to answer the question: why would he do it? It's not really that Rupert Murdoch wants you to pay for online content he wants you to buy his newspapers. He wants to strangle the internet.

Murdoch, at 78, doesn�t, practically speaking, have the time to see
the online world into maturity�nor the intellectual interest to want to
be part of the effort. Rather, his strategic effort may more logically
be to slow it down.
The mordant joke among journalists is that, with any luck, the older
among us will make it to retirement before the business entirely
collapses. This may be part of Rupert�s own thinking.
It is not so much that he wants people to pay to read Jeremy
Clarkson online; he wants them, or a portion of them who might
otherwise have read a free Clarkson online, to return to the newspaper.
It is not, what�s more, merely that Murdoch objects to people
reading his news for free online; it�s that he objects to�or seems
truly puzzled by�what newspapers have become online. You get a dreadful
harrumph when you talk to Murdoch about user-created content, or even
simple linking to other sites. He doesn�t get it. He doesn�t buy it. He
doesn�t want it.
Every conversation I�ve had with him about the new news, about the
fundamental change in how people get their news�that users go through
Google to find their news rather than to a specific paper�earned me a
walleyed stare.
The more he can choke off the Internet as a free news medium, the
more publishers he can get to join him, the more people he can bring
back to his papers. It is not a war he can win in the long term, but a
little Murdoch rearguard action might get him to his own retirement.
Then it�s somebody else�s problem.

So it's not so much that Murdoch is offended when people read his content for free on the internet but that they are reading it on the internet at all. At 78 he doesn't understand the internet and can't really imagine that people wouldn't to read an actual newspaper. I'm not totally unsympathetic to this since at 63 I still love to read my newspaper in the morning and I find the idea of E-books to be offensive. But Rupert is swimming upstream but he hopes he can keep his head above water until he dies.

Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Rupert Murdoch VS The Internet

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