Sign of The Times

[ewx]

The Times are going to start charging for access to their online newspaper shortly. (This includes the Sunday Times.) The cost will be £1 for 24 hours or £2 for a week.

[Poll #1569396]

Comments

[armb.livejournal.com]

Me too. Possibly also "not unless all the other major UK newspapers and the BBC start charging even more than the Times".

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Inexplicably, the Murdoch family think that the BBC should be forced to charge more than they do.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Seems perfectly explicable to me, just not in the public interest.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

I felt the sarcasm was sufficiently obvious not to need explicit marking :)

[(Anonymous)]

There is an argument that it is in the public interest for the BBC to have competition. Otherwise it could become lazy and complacent. That argument is exactly why we have ITV.

Of course, currently the Times is not the BBC's only competition, but with, as I understand it, every other newspaper losing money hand-over-fist -- especially on their online operations -- there may come a point when either the competition will have to be subsidised, or the BBC will have to be more heavily regulated.

And I say that as one of the biggest defenders of the BBC, and the license fee, and the BBC's entitlement to keep the license fee (not happy to see the government plans to steal money from the license fee to fund broadband) that I know.

S.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

We have, what, five private sector news gathering operations at the moment? (And that’s ignoring the tabloids and things like Reuters.) I think there’s still some room for mergers or just plain failures in there.

(ITV’s woes seem to me to have as much to do with their own terrible decisions as anything. I mean, Friends Reunited? Seriously.)

Oh, and with you on broadband funding.

[(Anonymous)]

Merging two loss-making companies doesn't magically transform them into a profitable enterprise, you know.

The issue isn't that the market is too fractured so that no one company has enough share to be viable, it's that the market is dysfunctional because you can't compete with free. Even if there were only one alternative to the BBC, it would still be making a loss if it tried to provide online news at no cost, because you simply can't get enough revenue from online advertising these days to not go bust.

(I'm not considering ITV here because they have negligible online news presence.)

S.