Tech Predictions for 2010
Google cofounder Sergey Brin listens to Rupert Murdoch speak underneath a projection of the News Corp. CEO in Jerusalem.
The biggest, most powerful, and once-thought-to-be indestructible print media outlets have arrived at their moment of reckoning. For a decade, the likes of the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times (not to mention innumerable other outlets, including this magazine), have offered up their best work on a silver, online platter--for free. Look at where it got them. The first is in jeopardy of closing up shop, the Post has shuttered its domestic bureaus, and the Gray Lady just eliminated some 100 newsroom jobs, the second such move in two years.
Enter Rupert Murdoch, the outspoken Aussie head of News Corp., whose empire spans from the Times of London to the most august business publication in the United States, The Wall Street Journal. For months now, he has been ranting about the free consumption of news online. His radical idea? Murdoch wants to stop Google from indexing his sites, and he wants Microsoft to pay for the privilege instead. In other words, he wants someone to pay (online advertising ain't cutting it) for the stuff his journalists produce. A chorus of bloggers is crying that the old man's thinking cuts against the force of history--namely, that information wants to be free, and that any future-minded company ignores that fact at its peril. Techdirt says the news baron is a hypocrite. Boing Boing says Murdoch's threat to block searches and shroud his sites with paywalls is nothing more than a bluff. Think again. This isn't a doddering old coot who doesn't get the Web. Murdoch is a savvy businessman who just might lead an industry back into the reality-based community. With billions in cash on hand, he can afford short-term losses as his properties experiment with strategies that do not involve the essential untenability of giving the product away. And once he proves that a news publication can poke Google in the eye and survive, others will follow suit. After all, if they don't, Murdoch may be the only one left standing.
(NEWSWEEK is owned by The Washington Post Co.)
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