Media mogul expects to start charging for newspaper content online
News magnate and former Simpsons guest voice Rupert Murdoch said yesterday that he expects to start charging for online newspaper content “within a year.” When Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal, he originally experimented with making the articles available online for free, but soon went back to a subscription model. He claims that the paper has had so many online subscriptions that it proves that “it is possible to charge for content on the web,” and he is going to apply the same model to his other papers around the world. With the decline of the newspaper business, he argues, it no longer makes sense for papers to give away their internet content for nothing. But come to think of it, Rupert Murdoch probably doesn’t think anything makes sense if he’s not getting paid for it.