I’ve been reading recently about plans by Rupert Murdoch’s news empire to begin charging for their content and I thought I’d throw my two cents in as to why I don’t think it will work.

While the dead tree press is undoubtedly dying, I get the feeling that the majority of this I because its readers are dying. While I never buy a newspaper and get all of my news online, my parents do both but rely on papers more. While my dad will go onto the BBC news website and may forward me the odd link they still buy the newspaper almost daily. I, on the other hand, have bought one maybe three times in my almost 19 years on this planet. Every time I do I undoutedly find myself skimming most of it and only reading the odd article or opinion column with a good title. In short, I read the newspaper like I read the Internet.

This morning I picked up a copy of the Observer lying on the table in the coffee shop where I was having a pastry and flicked through it. A few interesting pieces here and there but I honestly don’t think I got anything more from it because I (in theory) paid for it. When hearing arguments in favour of print one of the commonest things I hear is that we will lose people reading opinions other than the one they already hold but I can’t see how this I the case. Newspapers often have obvious bias and people are often very loyal to their newspapers. Therefore already we have the situation where people are not really encountering opinions other than their own. Meanwhile if you take the blogosphere you encounter many thousands of opinions, some of which will be in line with yours and some which won’t be. If you chose not to read the ones that you disagree with then I expect you would have done that with the newspaper as well.

The other thing which confuses me about what Murdoch wants to achieve. His companies recently laid off a lot of their Internet sub-editors and gave their work to the print sub-editors. I know this to be the case because a friend if mine was until recently a freelance Sun online sub-editor. What does that say about the priorities being placed on the web division over at News Corp?

Just like the record industry we are seeing another example of them taking their old business model and a big hammer, and then bashing hell out of it until it vaguely fits a shape to wrap around the internet. If they don’t totally throw out the old and bring in the new we will see their demise sooner than later. Opinions are nice, but I don’t have to pay for them for them to be any good. Some of the best I know have been heard over a pint. Free speech, but not free beer…