Category Archives: attentioneconomy

Independent: Murdoch will pay for the end of free news

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Jimmy Leach: "Murdoch has never shown any real understanding of the attention economy of the web, of the promiscuity of news consumers who cares more for the subject matter than the logo at the top. There is no brand loyalty on the web – especially not if you make your content difficult to find, and you charge people to read it when they’ve done so."

open Democracy: Journalism’s many crises

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Todd Gitlin: "Four wolves have arrived at the door of American journalism simultaneously while a fifth has already been lurking for some time. One is the precipitous decline in the circulation of newspapers. The second is the decline in advertising revenue, which, combined with the first, has badly damaged the profitability of newspapers. The third, contributing to the first, is the diffusion of attention. The fourth is the more elusive crisis of authority. The fifth, a perennial - so much so as to be perhaps a condition more than a crisis - is journalism’s inability or unwillingness to penetrate the veil of obfuscation behind which power conducts its risky business. "

Independent: The press must stop this lunacy of giving content away for free

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Stephen Glover: "It is true that online readers will pay for specialised information not widely available elsewhere on the net. The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are two cases in point. But will online users pay to read about Liz Hurley's maunderings on sex and the countryside if they can access the same stuff on other websites for free? For charging to work for publishers, it would have to apply across the board. That seems unlikely given the global and multifarious nature of the net. ... Until or unless someone works out how to monetise online readers in their existing numbers, newspapers will continue to weaken. Much as I would like to, I don't think charging is the big idea."