Bronte Media

As they say in the classics: You only hurt the ones you love. And any cursory search of this blog for “Murdoch” will know of my love of all things Rupert. But all of the posturing about Google is a parasite and that users should pay for news is ludicrous and must stop.

It has been far too long since Murdoch and others announced their intention to get users to pay for news (an utterly useless and futile exercise as the industry found the first time around in 2001). And now Murdoch is saying that the implementation date will slip past his previously stated and generous June 2010 deadline.

I get that these things are said in public for a reason. Whether it is to negotiate a better deal with Google for advertising or get the government to give them a concession on tax or fool stupid investors for a little while longer. But it already is coming up on a year from when the “user should pay for news” statements were surfaced and it will now be 2 years before we see the start of them.

In the hallowed words of the great Evan Neufeld, whose favorite phrase was uttered in meetings at Jupiter frequently, “Shit or get off the pot”.

Step away from the microphone, stop talking and start doing something. And if you aren’t (which they clearly aren’t), then shut the fuck up.

p.s. Ironically, only one of the “users should pay for news” crowd, Newsday/Cablevision has actually begun charging users for web site access to general news and they announced that revenue had grown 9% year over year [PDF] recently – the two obviously not being correlated *cough* *cough*.