Congratulations citizens of the world. The final days of the prophesy are at hand and information is almost completely free! Let Joshua's holy trumpet sound once more, the odious and restrictive pay walls that kept you from the knowledge you sought are crumbling and falling. No longer will your hard-earned money be thrown away on profligate fact-checkers and pointless proof-readers. No longer will meddlesome copy-editors get between you and the truth. From here on your information will come direct from the source, unconstrained by such petty and outmoded concerns as objectivity and taste.  

In this new, shiny and Breit-bart world, soccer moms with dial-up modems will deliver your breaking news, fully fact-checked by tweenagers on wikipedia. Fox news contributors will crowd-source the very latest hearsay via their Facebook group and deliver it to you as iron-clad fact. Need to corroborate a story? Simply choose between 4000 conflicting retweets and pick whichever version of events best suits your political temperament.  

But our work is not yet complete. Still a few remaining regional and trade publications cling to the harmful ways of the past. Let us be unrelenting, let us not rest until every publishing house is put out of business, until every so-called journalist is unemployed, until all news is filtered through racist 8th graders and delivered via Google Buzz, until we are able to join hands and sing in the words of wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream: "free at last, free at last, thank God almighty information's free at last"

On the back of box office smash, Avatar, and better than expected profits, Rupert Murdoch declared yesterday: "The debate over the primacy of content is over: content is not just king. It is the emperor of all things electronic." As Carly Fowler noted on this blog 2 weeks ago, a serious backlash is currently under way which presages the end of free content as we know it. While I may not see eye-to-eye with the proprietor of Fox News on most things, the reality is that Mr Murdoch may be the one player with enough clout to bring about the necessary rebalancing to the content equation.  

Last summer, Rupert Murdoch, leader of the News Corporation media conglomerate, made waves when he announced during an earning’s call on August 6 that his News Corporation would be leading the charge to reclaim journalistic content from the free, unpaid-for wilderness of the internet.

Murdoch stated, “Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting.” He added, “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news Web sites.”

Yesterday, the New York Times, arguably the United States’ most venerable and respected newspaper, and undoubtedly a leader in the beleaguered newspaper industry, made an announcement that seemed to validate Murdoch’s predictions. The newspaper announced that in 2011, it would start charging for frequent access to the New York Times website.

This is just latest indication that the news industry is changing at a blistering pace. In the past year, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has moved all of its content online and the Boston Globe was forced to institute $20 million in cuts on the heels of layoffs. Every day seems to bring new stories about local papers with decades of history shutting their doors or major news outlets laying off staff and cutting content. Is the online subscription model the dying newspaper industry’s best hope?

The Wall Street Journal’s website charges for access to content, as does the Financial Times – models that have both been successful. The New York Times has indicated that it will likely follow the FT model: a user will receive access to a certain number of articles for free each month, after which he or she will be charged per article viewed. Alternately, users will be able to purchase subscriptions that allow unlimited access.

So what does this mean for the news industry going forward?

Industry experts note that the online subscription model might be harder to implement than the FT and WSJ examples initially indicate. New York Times media columnist David Carr has pointed out that both the FT and WSJ offer more than just access to news stories – they also offer specialized alerts and other content that are valuable to the business and finance communities to which they cater. Carr makes the point that getting people to pay for updates on the lives of celebrities, for example, will most certainly be more difficult, and surely he is right.

But the fact remains that the business model that the print media industry has relied on for so long is no longer sustainable, and once a critical mass of media outlets – perhaps led by the New York Times – acquiesce to this unhappy reality, their customers will very soon be confronted with the fact that, bottom line, quality content cannot be produced and disseminated for free.