When Rupert Murdoch first bought The Wall Street Journal, one of the few major newspapers charging readers for access, he suggested that he would soon remove the tollbooth in order to promote bigger readership and more ad views. Now, just a couple of years later, he is realizing that The Journal had it right, and ultimately protected the integrity of itself as a publication by keeping itself intact.
And it’s not as if Google is in this merely for the public good. Google makes its money by keeping everyone else’s content open to its searches and the ads that are stacked up alongside them. A world of open content is a world that is open to Google.
Sure, it’s hard to argue against the openness of a Google universe without coming off as dark, begrudging, and conservative as someone like, well, Rupert Murdoch. And as a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a “people’s” Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do. But the competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can’t do better, so be it. But at the current rate, we won’t have the opportunity to find out.
Of course, Murdoch’s remarks are really just a trial balloon. He has initiated a conversation—but one that few of us are in a position to back up with a multibillion-dollar media empire. By suggesting that he is ready to pull the plug on universally searchable news, he is inviting other publishers in the same position to consider taking the same leap.
This blog is no longer active as of October 31, 2011
