How Murdoch's Paywalls Meant Some News It Broke Went Unnoticed & Uncredited
from the whoops dept
The saga of how ridiculously disappointing News Corps.' paywalls have been continues. We've already seen that the number of subscribers looks dismal, advertisers are running away and even publicists are avoiding pitching The Times stories, because it's just not worth it, considering the diminished audience. Now, as a bunch of you sent in, it's gotten so bad that when The Times actually breaks a story, almost no one notices -- and the eventual "credit" for breaking the story goes elsewhere.Apparently, The Times first had a particular political insider story concerning UK politics -- but the story got almost no attention until nine days later when a blog called Labour Uncut re-"broke" the story and got all the credit for it. That seems only likely to drive tipsters to make sure to avoid the Murdoch paywalled papers even more.
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Filed Under: journalism, paywalls
Companies: news corp
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bloging
For a blogger, paywalls could be VERY beneficial. if no one else is reading the stories, they can subscribe to a few sources, copy/paste, reword a few things, and publish important stories that no one else has seen, and they get to take all the credit, and earn a few pennies from adsense while they're at it.
Brilliant!
The only loser is the owner of the pay-walled site!
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Re: bloging
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Heh.
"Paul Staines says:
November 12, 2010 at 3:12 pm
As seen in the Times a couple of weeks ago."
I would like to ask this guy "By who?" but I don't know enough about prime ministers to defeat their spam thing.
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Re: Re: bloging
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Re: Heh.
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Re:
I have to wonder if the dead tree version is now sold in a plain paper wrapper, to prevent 'theft' of their stories from passers by.
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Many suffer because of Murdoch
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It's a PR Dream
By the time anyone notices it'll be old news.
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snicker
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Re:
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Maybe no TImes readers cared.
[Sometimes your lousy grammar *cannot* be overlooked:
You've a habit of duplicating words in the same sentence.
"The continuing saga of how ridiculously disappointing News Corps.' paywalls have been continued."
It doesn't scan or parse. Might if last word was "continues" but still unnecessarily duplicates words.]
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Re: Maybe no TImes readers cared.
It might if the last word was "continues", but it still unnecessarily duplicates words.
There, I corrected your bad grammar.
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Paying subscribers get stories 9 days before anyone else?
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Re: Paying subscribers get stories 9 days before anyone else?
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Re: bloging
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A sign of The Times
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Re: It's a PR Dream
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It's Not News When....
Even Murdoch must understand that. Or you'd think he would.
Then again, he's the man who almost singlehandedly destroyed Australian journalism by buying up everything in sight before he moved on the Europe and now the United States to do the same thing there.
While it's sad to see the decline and impending fall of one of the "newspapers of record" in the English speaking world perhaps it will convince it's namesake in New York to put the brakes on it's plans to hide behind a paywall. Then again, maybe not.
The Wall Street Journal gets away with it, sort of, because it has pretty much got a captive audience who aren't convinced they can get the "inside dirt" on the financial industry anywhere else.
Come to think of it, how many stories do you see since THAT paywall went up that credit the WSJ for anything?
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Re: bloging
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story
We missed the story like all the other political press (although it now appears the Times didn't help themselves by spiking the story with a throw away line rather than going big on the story). A week or so later we heard about it from sources and reported it.
So we were late to the party with everyone else, and still got the credit for breaking the story.
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