Durova wrote:
Mr. Murdoch wants to shift to a paid access model for online the online versions of his news holdings. He's negotiating a deal with Microsoft's search engine toward that purpose.
It's hard to understand the conjecture that Wikipedia ties in with those plans. If anything, Wikipedia's habit of referencing historic news articles would help Mr. Murdoch's bottom line because it sends traffic to old articles, which can generate advertising revenue from old news that would otherwise be valueless.
If he's right about paid access being the most profitable model, then his self interest would be best served by fencing new content within a paid access only for a brief time: a week at most. By that time it becomes old news and there's more money to be made through advertising. Successive release to different venues is standard practice within the entertainment industry: a film starts with theatrical release, and once that exhausts itself it goes to cable, DVD and network television in descending order of profitability.
If this is his plan and it becomes the news industry standard then it could make breaking news less burdensome upon Wikipedia's administrators: fewer people will read the news immediately and edit Wikipedia. Of course Wikipedia might also be the wrench in his plans because he can't prevent his readers from updating Wikipedia, significant news readership would shift to Wikipedia, and we have no reason to stop being a free venue.
The news "industry" is in as much a quandary as the music and film industries. It's a model that depends heavily on news as entertainment. That's the only model that seems to justify the /ad nauseam/ treatment of such topics as Anna Nicole Smith's death or the Balloon Boy of Colorado. If a Florida mother kills her infant daughter it's a tragic personal event, but it should have no real effect on the lives of persons away from the immediate situation. Yet another boring speech by a politician is not going to sell much news. Those who would critically read through such speeches are also likely to be just as critical of advertising, or to simply dismiss the ads as background noise.
Certain copyright issues are also at the heart of the problem, notably that you can't copyright information. You can copyright expression, but Wikipedians are quite happy to not use the actual wording of news reports. News services at one time relied on the patronage of small town media who were delighted to receive anything from the outside world; they could in turn easily edit that news to suit the pleasure of their local advertisers. Now, readers have more access to other interpretations of the same information. If Murdoch charges for information, I can often go to another competing site and get it for free. If he is the only source for the information, someone with access can with impunity repeat that information on another site as long as he does so in different words. Conditions of use that treat public information as proprietary may very well be beyond the legal capacity of the commercial sites.
I don't dispute that it's expensive to have newsworthy items properly covered by enough reporters for credibly objective treatment. A single embedded reporter is too vulnerable to infection from the tunnel-vision of those who embed him. At the same time, is an organisation like Wikinews in any position to send its own reporters to cover a difficult story? The cost of news coverage and the funding of those costs are headed in opposing directions. I have yet to see anyone with the vision to resolve that divergence.
Ec