Murdoch trashes his prime brands with a 'paywall'

News corps's move to charge for accessing its papers over the web is bound to fail

Comment Matthew Lynn

Bold move

Starting this month, both the Times and the Sunday Times will start charging to access the papers over the Web

This is the first attempt by one of the big, international, general newspapers to put up a paywall around its whole website

There are a few simple rules that will st.and you in good stead in the markets: And never bet against Rupert Murdoch.

The Australian-born media tycoon, 79, has railed against the conventional wisdom in a career spanning many decades. He has taken plenty of rulebooks, ripped them up and come out a winner.

This month, he will make his most ambitious gamble yet: He will try to redesign the way the Internet and the media work by putting up a "paywall" around two of his British newspapers: the Times and the Sunday Times.

And this time he is doomed to fail.

It is a bold move. Certainly, anyone who cares about journalism should hope it succeeds. There is little sign that Internet advertising will ever be strong enough to replace the revenue that used to come from selling printed newspapers.

There are several reasons why it won't work. First, if newspapers wanted to start charging for their websites, they should have started more than a decade ago, when the Internet was emerging as a medium. Once you set a price for any consumer product, it determines what people expect to pay for it. In this case, the price is zero. It will prove impossible to shift that perception now, particularly when there are lots of other news sites that don't charge.

Second, the product isn't worth the price. That isn't a criticism of the Time in particular. Even British highbrow newspapers have placed too little emphasis on substance, and too much on entertaining and exciting their readers. Sensationalism worked as a strategy in the print world, when you were trying to get people to buy copies in a shop, usually with eye-catching headlines. Online, newspapers aim to build relationships with their readership through subscriptions. That involves creating a higher degree of trust and credibility. Newspapers have spent too much time blaming new technology for their decline and not enough examining what they offer readers.

Third, it is hard to see a future for traditional papers on the web. The newspaper was a product of two old technologies: the printing press and the delivery truck. It provided a bundle of news, sport, business, crosswords, television guides and gardening tips, all organised by a single editor. That worked fine for old media, when our access to news was very limited, but is irrelevant now that we can get all kinds of stuff from around the world with just a few mouse clicks.

Imagine if EMI tried to sell us CDs with its selection of new music - some classical, some jazz, some pop. It wouldn't word. The customers would be baffled. Likewise, the package that newspaper editors put together doesn't make sense anymore. Why not get soccer news from one source, television reviews from another, and political commentary from a third?

People will pay for news and entertainment. They always have. But in a world that depends more and more on information, readers are much more selective and no longer rely on the one-stop shops that newspapers have always been.