This should result in an epic fail for news orginisations, the reality is not all of them are going to switch because Murdoch does, and so it goes that the news will be free elsewhere….

So a drop in readership will result in a fall in ad revenues and so it goes…

The reality is especially in SA, there is not one media orginisation whose work is worth paying for, so the pay for a read model will only result in a drop in readership.

That coupled with the fact that news today is more asscoiated with the bottom line of the publication than the public interest and the biggest source of stories is the internet, its hard to believe that this will be a success.

There is an interesting tension, too, between sites that gather the news (via hard news reporting, undercover investigations and bureaus in far-flung destinations) and those that comment on it.

Reporting hard news is an expensive business and the internet has placed reporters and commentators (who – in the case of a one-man-show blogger – have few overheads to speak of) on the same footing.

The free model makes sense for bloggers, but is more challenging for the larger news gathering organisations. Particularly when their expensive-to-generate content is being reused for free in the blogosphere!

Google clearly don’t believe in charging consumers for news as they unveiled a free online news reader called Fast Flip yesterday, featuring stories from the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media outlets. Read more: http://www.ioltechnology.co.za/article_page.php?iArticleId=5165392 At a first glance it looks pretty impressive, check it out and let us know what you think.

Interesting update on this: the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times are both charging for access to their online publications already, and it sounds like the New York Times will follow suit soon: http://ow.ly/XAaN