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Due to the move of the blog to Wordpress posts from Jan 2012 onward will have commenting disabled (when I remember to do it)
Cheers - AE

Friday 11 February 2011

Here comes another paywall.

What is it with Rupert Murdoch? Is he determined to make sure I only get the Grauniad/Fairfax side of things? I'm not saying he's unbiased because The Australian seems mostly right of centre to me, but if I look at both publications, smash the contents together in my mental LHC (Large Horseshit Collider) and filter things through a layer of common sense I reckon I get something that can at least pass for neutral reporting in poor light. Rupes, however, seems determined that I should have only one point of view, and bizarrely it's not his.
The Australian will charge people to read its website some time this year, but won't say how much it will cost or exactly when it will become the second major Australian newspaper to install a paywall, after Fairfax's Financial Review.
Hey Rupert. Want to know how much Times/Sunday Times content I've read since it went behind the wall? Exactly what was reprinted in The Australian. Want to know how much content from The Aussie I'll read when the wall goes up?

Go on, guess.

Your idea is that I should be prepared to pay for quality reporting, or so it was said of The Times' paywall, and I would. I'd pay for extra content that interests me, for example, and sometimes I buy the weekend papers for that reason. But why would I pay for general reporting that is no better than what's freely available elsewhere just because the editorial slant tends to balance that of the Fairfax mob? It's just not worth it to me.

So what I'm going to do instead, starting from when you through the paywall up, is spend a lot more time at the websites of The Age, Canberra Times and Sydney Morning Herald. And I'm going to click a lot of the ads while I'm there, because why fucking not? If that's where you want me looking they might as well make a few bob from it.
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