Google and other companies that aggregate content without paying a fee have been likened to “parasites… in the intestines of the internet” by Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson.  Talking of parasites, I recently got a phone bill for $50 of ‘premium messages’ that I tracked back to a quiz I answered on Facebook. So I have paid $5 a throw for some total crap I didn’t want. These two might appear unconnected, but I want to draw attention to the irony that we consumers are willing to pay millions and millions of dollars for mobile texts while refusing to pay a few cents for professionally produced online news.
It has always struck me as unfair that media companies pay their journalists to produce content while the aggregators simply swipe it, stick a few ads round it, and reap the rewards.   Journalism at its best exposes injustice and produces in depth analysis, but think about the cost, say, of sending journalists into Afghanistan or Timor.    Finely crafted writing doesn’t come cheap.  But is anyone out there willing to pay for it?
I agree with Google CEO Eric Schmidt that newspapers need to innovate more to turn their news-making machines into profit centres. He suggests mobile as one path, and I’m guessing that means on-phone subscriptions for web-based content. If the price was right and I had the right device (which I don’t because I’m still paying for my last phone, and my kids’ phones), and it was easy to view on the screen, yes, I probably would pay to consume high-quality news on my mobile.
But I don’t want to pay through the nose for spurious, uninvited text messages…..  I’d much rather pay News Ltd for some decent reporting than some smutty text-messaging company who hijacked my details through some fineprint on Facebook….

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Tags: AAP, AP, mobile, news aggregation, SMS, text messaging, Yahoo
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