RSS Feed (xml)
Friday that it is time for search engines and others who use news
content for free to pay up. The comments from The Associated Press'
Tom Curley and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp come as the media
industry struggles in the Internet age. Many news companies contend
that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune off their articles,
photos and video without fairly compensating the news organisations
producing the material. "We content creators have been too slow to
react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input
or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of
300 media leaders in Beijing. "Crowd-sourcing Web services such as
Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook, have become preferred customer
destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional
news publishers," Curley said. "We content creators must quickly and
decisively act to take back control of our content." He said content
aggregators, such as search engines and bloggers, were also directing
audiences and revenue away from content creators. "We will no longer
tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves -- at
great human and economic cost -- to gathering news of public interest
and those who profit from it without supporting it," Curley said.
Murdoch also told the opening session of the World Media Summit in
Beijing's Great Hall of the People that content providers would be
demanding that they be paid. "The aggregators and plagiarists will
soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we
do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it
will be the content creators -- the people in this hall -- who will
pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph,"
the News Corp chief executive said. Curley said in a speech earlier
this week in Hong Kong that the AP was considering selling news
stories to some online customers exclusively for a certain period,
perhaps half an hour. The AP licenses its stories and photographs to
many of the Internet's main hubs, including Google, Yahoo and
Microsoft's MSN, and its work is also used by hundreds of Web sites
owned by newspapers and broadcasters. Currently, they all get the
material at the same time. Curley did not clarify how a product that
provided some news earlier would work or specify the target customers
for the potential new service. The AP already plans to roll out a
system, called a news registry, that will track its content online
and detect unlicensed uses in ways that could help boost revenue for
the not-for-profit news cooperative, which was founded in 1846 , and
its member newspapers. The system will be tested in six weeks by
nine newspapers as well as a sports statistics provider run jointly
by AP and News Corp. The AP and its member newspapers contend that
unauthorised use of their material is costing them tens of millions
of dollars in potential advertising revenue at a time when they can
least afford it. The AP's revenue is expected to be around $700
million this year, down from $748 million in 2008 , in part because
of reductions in the fees it charges newspapers and broadcasters,
whose advertising revenue has been dwindling as more marketers shift
to less-expensive or better- targeted options online. Murdoch has been
a strong advocate of charging for online content. News Corp already
owns the newspaper industry's most successful Internet subscription
model in The Wall Street Journal, with more than 1 million customers
who pay for online access. Murdoch had said in the past he hopes to
make online fees pay off for his other publications, which include
the New York Post and The Times of London. He hasn't provided
specifics about his plans. Last month, The Wall Street Journal said
it plans to start charging as much as $2 per week to read its
stories on BlackBerrys, iPhones and other mobile devices, expanding
the newspaper's effort to become less dependent on its print
edition. The mobile fees will be imposed in the next month or two,
Murdoch said at the time. Murdoch and Curley were speaking to 300
representatives from more than 170 media outlets from 80 countries
at a meeting that will look at the challenges and opportunities the
media face from the Internet, technology changes and the world
economic crisis.
