Syzygy - 10:19 am on Apr 3, 2009 (gmt 0)

"People reading news for free on the Web, that's got to change," said Murdoch...

There's the crux of it. He can argue and finger point as much as he likes as to whether it's the fault of search engines, or anyone else, but the plain fact is that the business model of the publishing empires has to change.

I come from a commercial publishing background, and in the last company I worked at the web was providing an excellent source of revenue. Not only was (is) it an extremely milkable cash cow, but the overheads are nothing when compared to publishing a physical product. Money is there to be made, you just have to know how to extract it from your advertisers.

One of the biggest problems faced by the likes of Murdoch is that profits are never enough. Shareholders demand more - are continually promised more - and you can't cover your own bloated overheads and feed greedy shareholders at the same time under this type of business structure.

Behemoths like News Corp have another major problem - they are behemoths. They need to streamline dramatically and look in-house first for ways to do so.

Next they'll be aiming the same claims at libraries: think of all those people in libraries who read papers and magazines for free - something must be done! All right, the scale is not the same, but the principle is.

Blaming other parties for your own woes isn't going to solve anything. Reinvent or die. That's the only option available for publishers.

Syzygy