Murdoch to give subsciption services a go
The 7 o’clock news on Channel 4 this evening ran a story about the future of online journalism, and how, if Rupert Murdoch has his way, we will soon have to pay to read the news online. He claims the current market system for online news is ‘malfunctioning’ and hemorrhaging money at a dangerous rate.
This is due to poor advertising standards, according to Murdoch. Murdoch’s company News Corp, is suffering a loss in profitability that is probably the driving force behind this idea.
Personally I believe that this will only succeed if all the news sites were to turn to subsciptions at the same time. Murdoch claims he will begin a subsciption service on one of his British online news sites (The Times, The Sun), but I think he will soon find a diminishing user base as his readers flock to one of the other free news sites
The Irish Times is falling behind
This is inspired by a blog post by Ciara NiShe who points out that, unlike most of its competitors, the Times does not provide hyperlinks in its stories. Even its main rival, the Irish Independent, succeeds in this area. Most of these links bring users to stories of a similar nature on the site, but others send users to the source of the story.
As I found out during my research for my Online Journalism essay, hyperlinks such as these are fundamental to a successful website. They are the simplest form of interactivity (navagational interactivity) and as such, the Irish Times is lagging behind in terms of providing a user friendly interface.
This does not seemed to have affected their user base however, as Alexa (a web monitoring company) rates them 2nd highest news site in Ireland, just behind RTÉ.
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