Dear Mr. Murdoch:
We’re so fortunate that we can entrust you with the future of the news business in the U.S. Such a shrewd business leader, too. Can you help a confused citizen understand your plan to save the news?
1. You’re going to charge people to read a story online that they won’t read, and won’t buy, in print.
2. You’re going to remove the coding that enables Google to index and distribute the story to those who might want to find it through the Google search engine.
3. You’re going forfeit an estimated $15 million in advertising based on the traffic Google sends you.
4. You’re going to get Microsoft to pay you for exclusive rights to search your stories through Bing, which captures less than 10 percent of the search market, even though most people will be able to find them them by other means if they want.
5. You’re going to force the really motivated to go to other sources and accounts of the same story.
6. You’re going to force those who are directed to your version of the story to navigate a pay wall, pay to access a link to your site, then click through.
7. You’re going take the rest of the newspaper industry with you.
Did I get all that right? For a while you had me thinking that you just wanted to extract more money from Google.
