13 Aug 09 Why news should be free

Rupert Murdoch wants you to pay for online news.

*facepalm*

That’s what I did. Seriously. News is news is news. You shouldn’t pay for it.

Before the internet, we paid for newspapers to get the news. Why? It makes sense to me, that we did it because we paid for the physical product. We paid for the paper the articles were written on, we paid for the distribution and we paid for the writers. If newspapers didn’t exist, news would still spread, but it would be through word of mouth. That’s as free as it can get. Newspapers could charge money for bringing news together in a physical product and then making it slightly more reputable.

When TV came along, news became even more free. We simply had to pay for the TV subscription. No real need to buy newspapers. Both of these mediums had ads to support them. Many eyes saw TV and print ads.

Now the internet came along, further minimalising the opportunity costs for news. With the internet, news became democratized. We could share news by just lifting our fingers. This also meant that news sites saw countless eyes on their pages, further increasing ad revenue.

The internet closed the time and space for news to spread. The internet is word of mouth news without the space and time restrictions. Why should someone monopolise something that happens? No one owns news.

News sites shouldn’t expect us to pay for it: not in this age. Your advantage as a news site is the eyes that read the pages. If you limit that, the news will inevitably spread through other channels.

That’s my opinion at least. Who agrees with me? Am I missing something?

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