Not any more:
But, today, it (the deal) illustrates just the latest example of backward-thinking by legacy media executives who've been left lost and clueless by the Internet revolution.
Niles is more than a little gleeful about this wrong-headed move because he detests "the Fox News' cynical Republican-propaganda-masquerading-as-news" stuff that News Corp. produces.
But he also makes the point:
The Internet is killing one legacy media business model, however, and that's the supply-side model based on creating value by restricting access to content. That's the model upon which the News Corp.-Microsoft deal is based. While it might have worked in a pre-Web, channel-driven world, the public simply has spun too many ways around content-control deals to make this one worth Microsoft's time or investment.
Can't say as I disagree with much that Niles had to say.
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The Southeastern Conference, when it attempted to ban most media from covering its games early this season, conveniently forgot that the media was responsible for the fame of its schools and athletes in the first place. Without the bulk of the media covering those games for the last century, they wouldn't have possessed the clout to sign yahoo and espn to lucrative deals and thereby ban other media outlets. Similarly, google and other sites are still profitting from the traffic they receive by users accessing content acquired from news sources. Especially with such a plethora of news outlets, people have little reason to stay loyal with one news outlet, though we journalist may long for the day when that happens. In the meantime, google is unduly reaping the financial traffic those media outlets bring to their mega search engine sites and applications, etc.. Google in turn would dispute that, arguing that their visitors will in turn go to the source of the news, i.e. Los Angeles Times, NY Times, etc. But in this age of the uniformed reader, the trend shows those site visitors reading just enough to stay on the search engine site without spending significant time on the news site. Let us therefore laud News corp. (though their content can hardly be considered news) for demanding money for content.
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