Washington - The struggling newspaper industry should not seek government help but must convince readers and online aggregators to pay for news on the web, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch said Tuesday.
Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post website accused Murdoch and other US newspaper publishers meanwhile of being in "digital denial" and said they needed to "stop whining".
The News Corp. chairman and co-founder and editor-in-chief of the popular news and opinion site were speaking at a two-day workshop here on journalism in the internet age hosted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
"The prospect of the US government becoming directly involved in commercial journalism ought to be chilling to anyone who cares about free speech," Murdoch said.
Warning against the government "using its heavy hand to overregulate or to subsidise us," he said newspapers "need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high quality reliable news and information does not come free."
"Good journalism is an expensive commodity," said the 78-year-old Murdoch, who repeated his intention to begin charging readers of News Corp. newspapers on the Web. "Quality content is not free."
Old model is 'dead'
Where government does have a role, he said, is in "reducing unnecessary regulation and eliminating obstacles to growth and investment" such as a rule prohibiting ownership of a newspaper and television station in the same city.
"The future of journalism is more promising than ever," Murdoch said, although "some newspapers and some news organizations will not adapt to the digital realities and they will fail."
"The old business model based on advertising only is dead," he said. "In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organisation to attract readers by providing news and information they're willing to pay for.
"In the new business model we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our internet sites," Murdoch said. "We are already charging - and successfully so - for the Wall Street Journal online.
"We intend to expand this pay model to all our newspapers in the News Corp. stable: the Times of London, The Australian, the rest," he said.
"Some critics say people won't pay," Murdoch said. "I believe they will."
Without naming names, Murdoch hit out against news aggregator sites "who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production".
"They're feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others," he said. "To be impolite it's theft."
Huffington rejected Murdoch's criticism of news aggregators saying they actually drive traffic to newspaper websites.
"In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back," she said. "Not in the media. They'd rather accuse aggregators of stealing their content.
"It's time for traditional media companies to stop whining," she said. "Trying to deny news consumers as wide a range of options and viewpoints as possible seems shortsighted - and ultimately self-defeating.
"Free content is not without problems," she said. "But it's here to stay, and publishers need to come to terms with that and figure out how to make it work for them."
Murdoch has specifically singled out Google for criticism in the past and has threatened to remove News Corp. content from its search engine.
Murdoch is also reportedly in talks with Microsoft to make News Corp. content solely accessible through the software giant's news search engine, Bing.
FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz said the event was being held because "journalism, at least in the traditional sense, is in trouble".
"We are living in a period of extraordinary change in which the bottom appears to be falling out of the news business," he said.
- AFP