Monday 24 November 2014

The Murdoch Pay Wall


1)      Do you agree with James Murdoch that the BBC should not be allowed to provide free news online?

I believe that the BBC should not be providing free news to the public as it is unfair on others institutions. The public already pay the BBC licence fee which covers the costs of the news with all the reporters and journalists. However, other institutions cannot do that as they are not public service institutions, they are businesses and are there to make money. I think the BBC should decrease the price in the licence fee so that they can charge people online for those who do want to subscribe and get news daily. The delivery of the news for people who go on to the BBC website is for free currently; however other institutions are not happy about this. The BBC must give audiences more choice, for them to choose whether they would like for the BBC to take out money from the Licence fee to pay for the news that they provide. Not everyone that pays the licence fee uses the BBC website for news. So this would mean that they would be getting more money than they should get. Which is why I think that they should decrease the amount of the licence fee and set up pay walls for those who would like to pay and view news online.  

2)      Was Rupert Murdoch right to put his news content (The Times, The Sun) behind a pay wall?


Rupert Murdoch I believe was right to put up pay walls. This is because now those newspapers are in decrease due to new and digital media enhancing and becoming bigger than ever with billions of users online and on smart devices, people look forward and use the new technology available to read articles. We know this due to the vast increase of people becoming on line users. By 2015 it is said to be that there will be 3 billion people that will become online users. Some of which will be viewing news. So why not set up pay walls if people are moving from newspapers to tablets/smartphones if they were already paying for newspapers. This ensures that they still keep their income up so that they are able to pay professional journalists to look for and write up news for people who value it. However, due to not every institution not following on from his footsteps people have been getting used to getting their news free from other institutions. This would mean that they would not be interested in paying for news when they could go to another site to get it free. These institutions get their money from advertising. Which is why, I believe that most institutions if not all should go up on pay walls, if not some then all. 






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