Rebekah “Babbling” Brooks won’t charge for online Sun and Screws

Peter — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:11:30 +0000

Rebekah “Babbling” Brooks announces that two News International titles under her control will start charging for online access come next May.
I understand that serious, quality newsgathering has to be paid for, and I deplore the fact that when the time comes (as it will) in which all commercially published newspapers have to charge for their online content in order to supplement the dwindling hard copy sales that currently pay for quality journalism, the BBC will still be offering it for free, subsidised by the licence payers.
This will be profoundly unfair, and massively damaging to non-state owned independent newspapers. The BBC will owe it to the British public who fund it to abandon this anomaly.
It became clear during the London ‘Freeshite’ bonanza that hard copy papers given away for nothing are worth, in news terms, a lot less than the paper on which they are printed [and not even a healthy arse-wiping option].
Similarly, Mrs Brooks evidently doesn’t feel she can charge for online content of her two prominent best-selling ShagRags – the Sun and the Screws – no quality journalism to pay for there. (Unfortunately she does have a number of lawyers’ bills and penalties to pay for a pile of upcoming damages for illegal phone-hacking, and they still have to fork out for unproductive journo-nasties like Mazher Mahmood, because he knows all the dirt on sensitive former execs, like Les Hinton and Andy Coulson – not to mention Stuart Kuttner).

Still, one must – albeit grudgingly – hail Ol’ Rumplechops for having the bollocks to lead where others will have to follow.

BBC charging for online services would supplement licence shortfall

Peter — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:59:58 +0000

The debate about BBC funding is a staple in media pages, throwing up an approximate divide between the political poles – the right deploring the waste of money and leftist tendencies of the organisation; the left committed the doctrine of supporting a publicly sponsored propagator of information/entertainment untainted by the commercial influence of advertisers.

Nobody’s suggesting – at least not very loudly – that the BBC should cease to be funded at all, but the Tories have signalled their intention to freeze the Licence fee.

The proposal that the BBC should derive some supplementary revenue from its digital online news dissemination treads on the toes of neither party.

I have argued on http://www.peterburden.net/archives/144 that, if as a nation we want to keep a healthy, independent press, we must create circumstances in which newspapers can earn revenue from their online news services; this can realistically only be achieved if the BBC – a principal source of online news – is also required to charge, thus creating a fair commercial platform for competition between public and private online news services.

No reading of the BBC Charter specifies that it must offer online services for nothing. And to those who would argue that the poor and unwaged would be starved of news to which they are entitled (and some will, you can be sure) I say, listen to Radio 4, which is free, then go to the public library and read the papers there.

Peter Burden » online news

Rebekah “Babbling” Brooks won’t charge for online Sun and Screws

BBC charging for online services would supplement licence shortfall