The drumbeat for erecting pay-walls around online news content continues, with Rupert Murdoch telling FOX Business his vision of the future. Let’s just say it requires you to give your credit card number to News Corp. if you want to read news from any of his sites.
News Corp., however, isn’t alone in these efforts. This week, the Newspaper Association of America gathered top media groups together in Chicago to quietly discuss options for deriving more revenue from their online content. Don’t worry, though. They assure us they weren’t colluding.
In attendance were representatives from MediaNews Group, which began testing its home printed custom newspapers this week. The content is supposed to match your interests, and so are the ads, which sell for ten times the normal rate.
If you can’t wait for custom print news, check out Time’s Mine magazine. You can pick content from five different Time’s properties.
This week, the New York Times hired Jennifer Preston to be the paper’s social media editor, not that any one, the Times included, knows just what that means.
And it also came to light this week that two former Times’ men had the scoop on Watergate before Woodward and Bernstein. Instead of digging in to the story, one went to law school and the other went on vacation.