Philip Gomes

The text in the above image was sent to Twitter via the AP's iPhone application which is one of the best apps out there, period. Get it if you have an iPhone.

In fact, I think the AP app points the way forward to a new web world, one where the idea of a conventional news website is starting to look very obsolete. But that's another story.

This sharing action by me and the web multitudes has now become a natural one in terms of content, and I'm happy to see the AP actively encouraging that.

How would you like that content served sir? Now that's customer service!

But it's a puzzling dissonance when you follow the link through to the article itself and read this quote from AP's Tom Curley at the World Media Summit held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China. The location is of course also dripping with irony.

We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing. Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said. "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.

Curley was not to be outdone, with News Corp's Rupert Murdoch following on and doing his best to label his customers criminals.

The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.

I'm no big media commentator but even I know enough to see that their words don't appear to match their actions. I'm also no Huffington Post or Google, but I and millions of others aggregate and curate content to our own small circles via a variety of web tools.

The thing about this new media environment is that no one gets out alive. You're either in, or you're out. You can't be both simultanously and seek to define the rules of engagement. And you can't go back. Which is of course where Curley and Murdoch want us to go.

Extended reading: Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine has a link rich post on this subject. Read it for greater context.

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James Murdoch's attack on BBC is specious and out of date: Will Hutton.

Murdoch's economics is out of date, preceding both the lessons we have learned about free markets from the financial crash and the latest thinking about what is good and bad about the market mechanism. Markets are prey to group think.

They need public agencies and regulators to save us from gross mistakes, and, paradoxically, to protect the pluralism that the market process extinguishes. It is true that great innovative advances, from the printing press to the internet, were helped by many "plural" hands.

Unfortunately for the Murdoch thesis, some of those hands – whether protestant German princes in the 15th century or the Pentagon's support of the internet – were public. There is, and always has been, an interdependence between private and public.

Murdoch's political philosophy is also ancient, locked in a cold war time warp. The BBC is not a Soviet-style unaccountable state-sponsored broadcaster; it is an independent, self-governing public corporation with a constitutional remit to serve the public interest and the citizen.

Public, "publicness" and citizenship are not concepts with which the Murdochs – a clan where genes mean preferment and citizenship obligations are for little people – are comfortable.

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...about James Murdoch's self serving hypocrisy at the MacTaggart lecture.

Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet. Yet it is essential for the future of independent journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it.

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Yesterday saw another installment in Rupert Murdoch's attempt to stem the tide of change.....or bend it to his will.

Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting.

Even though this may be all they have left in the face of a balance sheet rapidly going south all over the globe, you have to give the man some credit for trying. According to The Guardian the Sunday Times will be first to launch this experiment in paying for news content.

But for this plan to work he's going to have to do a lot to convince the punters - if the comments at the News.com.au version of the story are to be believed.

Predictably, readers say they will just go elsewhere, trashing News' version of the news as they head out the door.

Clearly News Ltd, journalism and journalists are not held in high esteem.

Who'd pay for this crap? Posted by: jack 6:09pm today Comment 88 of 139

After reading through the comments, the snarkier part of me wonders if a comment free version of News' news is something I'd pay for.

Interestingly though, if you read deeper into the comments you'll find a trade-off - people will pay - for an ad free experience.

Hopefully this will mean if we pay a fee to see the online edition then we won't have to have all these irritating adverts running in every available space on the page. Posted by: Andrew Jones 5:55pm today Comment 73 of 139

I think it's a credible trade-off, but can Rupert and other large scale publishers balance that in the face of declining ad revenue?

Imagine paying and having to deal with pop-ups, banners and navigation designed to enhance click through rates - would you consider that an enjoyable reading experience?

In addition to a quality assurance, readers will want a seamless, clean and uncluttered experience, without the usual advertising driven bag of tricks littering their desktops.

Naturally the dirty digger will pitch his paying customers to advertisers as a 'better' class of reader than the 'free' punters now consuming his web offerings and happily charge them more for that reach.

I'm looking forward to what many think a grand experiment in imperial overreach. Something tells me that, once again, the barbarians at the gate are likely to bring down another empire.

So, would you pay? Or better yet, what exactly would you pay for?

Elsewhere: Jeff Jarvis at the Guardian on how charging for content will open the door for other competitors. Derek Barry echoes Jarvis and wishes News Corp well. And Duncan Riley asks a simple but interesting question of News Ltd's John Hartigan.

Alan Kohler chimes in with Rupert and the death of hubris.

Advertisers and their agencies now rule the roost. They refuse to pay more than a tenth or so per unit of what they pay in print, and they demand much better service, such as only paying for actual new customers, not simply for “branding” that can’t be measured. And why shouldn’t they act this way? The publishers have been screwing them for a hundred years, charging outrageous prices to access their treasured audiences. Technology has now turned the tables. Rupert Murdoch’s answer to this is to screw his readers instead. Nice one Rupe.

Fun times.

Also crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo where there is a good conversation going on.

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