Murdoch banks on users paying for online news

(NECN: Ted McEnroe) – It’s been a topic of conversation for months. Now Rupert Murdoch says News Corp will take the plunge and force users to pay for access to the company’s news sites by this time next year. In a conference call shortly after News Corp announced it lost $3.4 billion in the last fiscal year, Murdoch told reporters the time had come to charge for access to sites run by Fox News, the New York Post, the Times of London and others. Murdoch says that if he succeeds, the world will follow. And Murdoch does own about the only property to achieve limited success charging for news content – wsj.com. The Wall Street Journal charges $119 per year for access to the site (paper subscribers get an online discount), and it has attracted an estimated 1 million subscribers, according to some reports. But whether a single walled garden in the vast world of general news will succeed remains to be seen – and many analysts are skeptical. The other question to be seen will be how the sites charge. Will they use an annual subscription model, like the Journal, or will they explore micropayments, where users pay small, incremental amounts for each article they access on a News Corp site. The company also announced it would raise the price for the Wall Street Journal on the Amazon Kindle, and Murdoch hinted that unless the company gets better terms with Amazon for its product (right now Amazon gets the majority of the revenue, and gets to keep the subscriber data), it might cancel its deal.