Durova wrote:
Mr. Murdoch wants to shift to a paid access model for
online the online
versions of his news holdings. He's negotiating a deal with Microsoft's
search engine toward that purpose.
It's hard to understand the conjecture that Wikipedia ties in with those
plans. If anything, Wikipedia's habit of referencing historic news articles
would help Mr. Murdoch's bottom line because it sends traffic to old
articles, which can generate advertising revenue from old news that would
otherwise be valueless.
Well, that's a sophisticated view of how rivalry is seen in the media
world. If the big picture is the Web eating the lunch of the newspaper
industry, because the papers have been undercutting each other for the
last decade by giving free content away, then the business solution is
to get out of free online access, but also to ask who has had the
benefit besides online readers, and do something about it.
Charles