As promised, Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers are moving to a pay model, it’ll be two quid a week to read the Times from July.
Many of you will have previously clicked on a link to an article at, say, the New York Times and been confronted with a page saying “Register for FREE to read this article.” If you’re anything like me, you almost always think “Screw that” and hit the back button because it’s just not worth the effort of filling in a form. And now the London Times will not only require a registration, but also require a credit card number and a subscription of some kind. Which is the point of course. Articles behind pay-walls are almost useless: You can’t link to them, you can’t share them, you can’t spread them, they don’t gather responses from people who can’t read it, they aren’t a part of the global conversation. All you can do it read them. One-way media. Plus of course things that don’t get linked to, don’t get read. So you can barely even do that unless you check their own individual specially biased selected index pages. So I welcome this change in the big conspiracy newspaper’s behaviour. I hope they ALL lock themselves behind pay-walls in their own little inaccessible corner of the web and let hoards of tiny independent media co-ops take over the mainstream news content instead of the big lumbering corrupt media giants. Hopefully any remaining good journalists at the Times will be able to quit and so cut the profit-whoring newspapers out of the loop and start self-publishing. You don’t need so many well paying ads to just support one journalist as you do to support an entire press team. Do we need to find ways to fund quality journalism? Yes! Certainly. But the resulting articles need to be freely available because as soon as you charge for that article it becomes less valuable. It’s worth more if it’s free, which means all pay-to-read articles are intrinsically worth less than their cheaper, freer, competition. The corporate media has never been good at funding quality journalism anyway. They just make things up, and even take to the courts to enforce their right to distort and falsify the news. If the corporate media, the Times etc., actually did represent the best journalism had to offer I might be a bit sad to see them go. But they’re not. They’re just tabloid biased lies and hate. We’re almost certainly better off not letting them program our minds. I hope we as a society find new ways to fund good investigative journalism, and I hope frankly that we can do it without having to concentrate power in massive easily-bought (if expensive) media conglomerates. In the mean time if those big conglomerates want to lock themselves out of the global conversation, if they want to hide in a minority audience behind toll-doors, then I for one applaud the removal of their biased lying scaremongering crap from the free web. Thanks Rupert! Can you please take the rest of your hate-filled biased rags off the free web as soon as possible too? Cheers. I just hope the dying moments of the soon-to-be-extinct big media corps don’t somehow bribe our government to betray us and gut the BBC, which is funded in a way which CAN give us free media, before the door hits them on their way out.