Well, I feel that the era of free news, notably my Google maybe coming to an end. I've read several articles about how Mr. Murdoch may start a trend to force Google to limit to five free articles per day, thus limiting various local coverage. I'm not looking forward to this as it will force me to look deeper for the specific new that we want.  8-P

I've wondered when the news outlets were going to go this way.  After all, they are businesses and they need revenue to make money.

I had always assumed that somehow the newspapers got some sort of financial cut from the stories posted on Google and Yahoo, but apparently (and inexplicably) they did not. (Or the $$$ was simply not enough to be viable).

I can't complain about this shift....

So who's this Murdoch guy, and what does he have to do with anything?  If I can't find his content on Google, it doesn't exist.

All the newspapers cut and paste their stuff from the same AP feeds, to which Google has a license.

Everyone else - from the front page to the editorial page - is basically blogging.  If you want a cross-spectrum of opinion and research, you can either read the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, or you can read whatever blogs get started by their respective smartest people when the underlying papers go under.

So who's this Murdoch guy, and what does he have to do with anything?  If I can't find his content on Google, it doesn't exist.

All the newspapers cut and paste their stuff from the same AP feeds, to which Google has a license.

Everyone else - from the front page to the editorial page - is basically blogging.  If you want a cross-spectrum of opinion and research, you can either read the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, or you can read whatever blogs get started by their respective smartest people when the underlying papers go under.


But at some point, SOMEBODY has to pay for field reporters and all the various overhead costs of a global news operation.  In terms of simple "raw facts" news reporting, the bloggers do very little of that; they typically provide analysis of somebody else's news gathering.  (Not all bloggers, of course, as entities like TMZ actually get involved in news gathering).

If the main newspapers go belly up, then the AP will have to jack up its rates to Google anyway.  People will pay for the news in one way or another...  :-\\

But at some point, SOMEBODY has to pay for field reporters and all the various overhead costs of a global news operation.

Rupert Murdoch owns Newscorp, best known for the FOX News Chanel and a bunch of right-wing tabloids.  If they kill off the news industry, they can supplant it with straight propaganda.  FOX has been working towards this for twelve years.  The Internet is not the same thing as the New York Times.  The Huffington Post or the Daily Kos, or whoever, cannot pay a bunch of field reporters to go to Afghanistan, or Israel, or Ecuador, or wherever.  Like you say, most of what you see on the Internet is blogging.  That is not news reporting.

The few corporations that have taken over the news business in the past 25 year killed off the beats that covered labor issues and investigative reporting of the rich and powerful.  News has been turned into an ipecac of celebrity gossip, snide commentary, and cheerleading for Wall Street.  It's the same with NPR, they just do it for people with three-digit IQs.  What so-called liberal commentators such as Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow do is respond to the same junk FOX News does, they just do it in a so-called liberal fashion, and NBC is still owned by the military-industrial complex, so they can't really speak truth to power -- though they do a damn good job of making it appear that they do. 

There are a few people I like who are in positions where they can document issues without corporate tutelage, but they are written off as entertainers, such as Michael Moore, or as marginal kooks, such as Amy Goodman.

All dictatorships know they have to control information.  Your grandfather's dictatorships just shut down on newspapers and threw publishers in prison.  We are much more sophisticated nowadays.  America is able to give the impression of free speech in a society utterly ruled by a few giant corporations to the point where you can say whatever you want and nobody cares.  Rather than quash ideas, make ideas irrelevant, it's much easier and far more sustainable.  If they lock up Amy Goodman, they make her a martyr and a first amendment hero.  If they ignore her and spend all day on Tiger Woods' busted car window, they have kept the name Goodman in obscurity and made news about nothing at all....and nobody feels like he or she lives in a state of information suppression.

Hopefully the BBC News Online will remain free, for it is not a newspaper and is already paid by the British TV Licence payer.