News Outlets Mimic Music Industry Stupidity by Limiting Free stories, Instead of Changing Business Model for Web.

The solution to the newspaper readership problem is right there in front of them. E-readers. Just like the cable companies, newspapers can rent out the e-readers, supply cheaper subscriptions and bundle other subscriptions to make it even more worthwhile. I would even sign up for it, and I hate paying the high subscription costs now that includes paper, ink and delivery.

It's time to change, yet newspaper companies would much rather plug the dike of open information with their finger than recreate their business model. The music industry lost a similar battle, when all they had to do was switch to downloads, making a lot of money along the way. But now Google, after getting a lot pressure, is kowtowing to an aging industry too afraid to change. From the NY Times (ironic):

Amid criticism from media companies that it unfairly profits from news content, Google is closing a loophole that allowed some motivated newshounds to read large numbers of articles on subscription-based sites without paying for them. In a change that Google announced in a blog post on Tuesday, the company will allow publishers to limit nonsubscribers to five free articles a day. Some news publishers, particularly Rupert Murdoch of the News Corporation, have recently accused Google of stealing content from them.

The end result is a less informed society, fewer guys like me doing blogs, more opinions/fewer facts and a false sense of security for a dying business model. I've had my say, now this comment on the above story written by another Times reporter:

How many times do I have to say http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com... that Google is not "stealing" content from Murdoch?

Following web convention, every web page on Murdoch's publications has a file called robots.txt, which Google looks for when it indexes the web. robots.txt tells search engines whether to index that page, and gives other information.

Those robots.txt files on Murdoch publications explicitly tell search engines to index them. It's as if the Village Voice were to accuse people of stealing their newspaper after they pick one up from a box marked "Free!"

Murdoch's real problem is that Google is beating him in the free market. Since Murdoch doesn't understand the Internet, and wasn't using Google until a year ago, that's not surprising.