The Future of News

We have seen what may be the NY Times’ (NYT) first defensive maneuver to protect itself against Rupert Murdoch’s plan to unseat it as the leading “national elitist general-interest paper.” A few weeks ago, Murdoch’s tag team of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and the NY Post took a swipe at the Sunday NYT Magazine’s luxury advertiser revenues by announcing their own glossy weekend magazines. No reaction from the NYT.

This time, Murdoch again went on the offensive by announcing the WSJ would drop its premium services paywall, now offering for free financial news that is sufficiently valuable that many had previously been willing to pay for it. The NYT is responding by making a deal to publish business news from Reuters, a wire service provider of widely available, commodity, one-size-fits-all news that never would have been sufficiently valuable to attract paid subscriptions. The NYT might be credited with recognizing that aggregated news from others will be critical to competing on the Internet. On the other hand, it will also be necessary to offer readers value-added facts and opinions they cannot get anywhere else. The NYT seems to be going through the motions without quite understanding them, and continuing to lose ground — ground they will never make-up unless some day they decide to play offense.