Free news coming to an end?Follow

Can we really define NewsCorp as "News", though? Isn't it the end of free propaganda?

To be honest, I'm glad NewsCorp will be charging for their crap, it means less people will be reading it.

Adding it to my favourites now

It'd be a shame if you couldn't read the New York Post any longer. A right shame.

But, anyway, newspapers typically aren't free, right? And they still show the news every evening? I don't see any big social issue here, just a migration from physical media to digital and a need to pay the bills.

This is what I was thinking. As long as people can get ANY news for free, they'll probably flock to that.

Granted, the WSJ Online seems to do OK business, but I was under the impression that there are few publications on the same level as it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/06/rupert-murdoch-website-charges

You may laugh but people pay to buy the sun and the news of the world. I picture swarms of chavs with fruitphones sighing up for it (at the same time as the rights to watch football).

I'm still concerned that as we go on with the conversion of media into digital form that we will end up denying the less fortunate access to mainstream media and news. When it becomes a requirement to be online to receive news and you need to pay for it, thats the end of free speech. Its no coincidence that all dictatorial regimes crackdown on the media to control the outflow of information. If we accidentally end up with information being controlled by access to money then we have created all the mechanisms for a dictatorship to thrive, for a police state to take over.

Of course, I'm just being alarmist, but I still feel that paying for access to news would be the start of a slippery slope into controlled state media.

Here endeth Gwyns rant of the day.

What?

"Free speech" is the freedom to speak, not the freedom to receive free access to commercial content.

But freedom to speak to whom? Without the backing of a distribution network, your voice is lost. One the fabulous by products of the internet has been the empowerment of the consumer through message boards, news sites and dare I say it, certain message boards of pissy techies who companies daren't cross. Dell and others have all suffered at the hands of the internet herd. Baaaaaaaa.

Now, the problem is, if making yourself heard on a mass scale would require you to publicise in a mass media outlet that is controlled by the state or state run companies that only paying subscribers sign up to. It could easily turn into a form of soft discrimination.

Free speech is great but as politicians know all too well, you need backing and time to make yourself heard.

Call me a cynic but I am seeing a gradual change of the internet from a place to be free to express yourself to one of a controlled media. But which quango or screening software will control our access?

Your response seems a little blithe from one who lives in a country where freedom of speech is supposedly prized.

If someone really wants to be heard they can always make a blog or something. This has nothing to do with freedom of speech.

This is not about free speech, as the vehicle used to facilitate that free speech.

The only change I foresee happening is that people outside of Sam's Club will eventually stop asking me for paper subscriptions to the Atlanta Journal Constitution and will instead start asking me to sign up for digital ones.

Good, less dead trees in the end.

When did Gwyn trip and fall into the retarded pool?


In before "years ago".

The only problem I see with news websites charging for content is a switch from people getting thier news from actual news websites to thinking that what they read on blogs is actual news.

Not that it isn't happening already, of course.