Further to my post

I see the Murdoches (or the Ruperts?) are on it again.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4347438/James-Murdoch-says-apps-cannibalize-newspapers

Sales of newspaper apps for devices like the Apple iPad are cannibalizing sales of physical newspapers, James Murdoch, head of News Corp’s operations in Europe and Asia, said on Friday.

Wherelse, in New Zealand APN seems to have a good grasp on the online/offline coexistence concept.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10686779

Brendan Hopkins, chief executive of APN, which owns the New Zealand Herald, yesterday told potential investors in its $150 million bond offer that the company was not interested in creating pay-walls.

“In the main we are an advertising company, 80 per cent of our revenue is from advertising.”

But Hopkins said the company hoped to build up its iPad application to allow differentiation between premium content and grazing.

APN launched its nzherald application in June and so far 24,000 had been downloaded for free.

Hopkins said he hoped to begin earning $1 million to $2 million from the application next year.

We all know what happens when an online searchers encounter a paywall. If I remember correctly, the number is above 80% of bounce rate. (quotable source needed here. Anyone?)

Instead of paywalling the news item, James Murdoch, why don’t you leverage the online space to build up a premium community with more-thorough demographics data and charge the marketers more to advertise to these people? They are prime market and advertisers would salivate over the opportunity to target the exact people that fit their products.

Apples don’t fall far from the trees, eh?

Further to my post before:News Ltd John Hartigan lashes out at bloggers

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has told a group of editors that he is confident that newspapers will find new ways to make money online by harnessing the vast reach of the internet.

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Ann Woolner, Bloomberg News Columnist, wrote that Newspapers need to control internet ‘parasite’.

In this article, she highlighted the fact that search engines and news aggregators gobble up news often without paying the producers a penny.

This sort of thing “leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications,” as former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon put it this month before a Senate subcommittee.

“The parasite is slowly killing the host,” testified Simon, author and writer of the HBO series The Wire.

While journalists and entrepreneurs look, belatedly, for a way to make journalism work online, newspapers are going bankrupt, their staffs shrinking.

One particular thing that interests me is this:

Thanks in part to a steady diet of free food, Google has grown into a worldwide giant while newspapers have had their guts hollowed out.

Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thompson even specifically slammed Google as “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet” back in April 2009.

While I agree on her points in regards to news aggregators (i.e., scrappers), she pointedly included Google in the same class. Is it true that Google is a parasite and is killing the newspaper industry?

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