Matthew Lynn: Time to bet against Murdoch

Opinion

There are a few simple rules that will stand you in good stead in the markets: Buy on the dips.

Don't trade too often. And never bet against Rupert Murdoch.

The Australian-born media tycoon, 79, has railed against the conventional wisdom in a career that has lasted many decades.

This month, he will make his most ambitious gamble yet: He will try to redesign the way the internet and the media work by putting up a "paywall" around the Times of London and the Sunday Times, two of his British newspapers.

And this time he is doomed to fail.

The content isn't good enough, and newspapers themselves are a product of technologies that don't work in a digital economy.

All Murdoch is going to achieve with this move is to kill off one of the most famous media brands in the world.

It isn't hard to see Murdoch's motives. The economics of the newspaper business are in a terrible state. Circulations are in steady decline. Their websites don't draw enough advertising.

Many papers are now losing money. No matter what they try, most newspapers we are familiar with won't exist in a decade.

Murdoch has decided not to simply stand by and watch the titles die slowly.

Starting this month, News Corporation, the owner of both the Times and the Sunday Times, will start charging to access the papers over the web.

It will cost £1 ($2.10) for a day, or £2 for the whole week.

One of Murdoch's newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, already charges for access to parts of its online edition.

But this is the first attempt by one of the big, international, general newspapers to put up a paywall around its whole website.

There are several reasons it won't work.

First, if newspapers wanted to start charging for their websites, they should have started more than a decade ago, when the internet was emerging as a medium.

Once you set a price for any product, it determines what people expect to pay for it. In this case, the price is zero.

Second, the product isn't worth the price. Even British highbrow newspapers have placed too much emphasis on exciting their readers.

Sensationalism worked as a strategy in the print world, when you were trying to get people to buy copies in a shop, usually with eye-catching headlines.

Online, newspapers aim to build relationships with their readership through subscriptions.

That involves creating a higher degree of trust and credibility.

Newspapers have spent too much time blaming new technology for their decline and not enough examining what they offer readers.

Third, it is hard to see a future for traditional papers on the web. The newspaper was a product of two old technologies: the printing press and the delivery truck.

It provided a bundle of news, sport, business, crosswords, television guides and gardening tips, all organised by a single editor.

That worked fine for old media, when our access to news was very limited, but is irrelevant now that we can get all kinds of stuff from around the world with just a few mouse clicks.

People will pay for news and entertainment. They always have. But in a world that depends more and more on information, readers are much more selective.

Charging for the Times won't change that. This is the one time it will be right to bet against Murdoch.

(Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

- BLOOMBERG