Kill The Bloggers

Another mainstream media story, this time from the New York Times, pushing the new reality where news consumers will supposedly have to soon start paying digital cash to read stories, columns and watch news video online. I've been reading about this for getting onto two years, and and it seems no closer to reality. Not much new in this story, but this final quote says it all about the biggest problem Old Media dinosaurs like Rupert Murdoch face :

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs. They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”

Too many bloggers and citizen journos willing to work for free.

For paid news content to work, and to generate the kinds of profits that media empires were once built on, the majors will have to eliminate the competition, including thousands of non-professional bloggers and ex-journos, who still want to keep writing, regardless of how justly or unjustly they are compensated for their work and effort.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch could stop paying himself and his family tens of millions of dollars a year, and eliminate one of the biggest costs of mega-corporate media : paying the massive executive salaries of those who don't do any journalism any at all.