Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch indicated that his company – News Corp – soon plans to start charging for all of the news content that it publishes online.
It’s not a completely unprecedented move by News Corp – they have long charged for online access to The Wall Street Journal with some success – but most readers agreed with our conclusion that the plan probably won’t work for most news outlets.
As it turns out, we’ll soon find out who’s right – us or Murdoch – as The Guardian reports that Murdoch’s master plan will start with a test on The Sunday Times website as soon as November.
The plan is to launch The Sunday Times at its own URL (sundaytimes.co.uk) and charge a to-be-determined fee for access, with a to-be-determined business model (subscription or per-article charges). It should be a decent sized test bed; according to The Guardian, the printed edition of the newspaper sells more than 1 million copies each weekend in the UK.