How to ruin a media empire...a step by step guide

Having been an active participant in both online and magazine publishing for over 15 years I feel at least a little qualified to voice an opinion on what Rupert Murdock is doing with his company News Corporation. Its clear that Mr. Murdock's view of internet based content is behind the times. While the Wall Street Journal has been an exception to the rule of fee based web sites I believe the part he is missing is why. Consumers of online information and news expect it to be free and easy to access. Readers of publications like WSJ tend to expense their access to this type of information and as times get tighter in the enterprise you can expect that these types of business subscriptions disappear in favor of free resources.

A recent piece of Forrester Research seems to back up my opinion. 80% just said NO Mr. Murdock

News Corp's latest attack against the norm is its ongoing issues with Google and their recently announced intention to stop Google from indexing their publications and to strike an exclusive deal with search engine Bing. Some analyst have estimated the change could cost News Corp up to 15 million annually. And it will reduce its overall search exposure to only 9.9% of traffic globally, Bings present search market share.

As Mr. Murdock continues to build walls around his content the thought struck me that this practice may in fact be hurting all content seeking Internet users. If this move to exclusive search partnerships actually gets traction it will hurt all of us. How would you like a future where you have to remember which search engine carries which companies content? Comprehensive content search could become a thing of the past.

I would like to see News Corporation spend its time innovating instead of hiding content behind the fiscal walls of the company. I'm jealous of Mr. Murdock and his empire if I had resources like his I would strive to be a leader in the Internet revolution not a laggard.