One Way Or Another We Will ALl Be Paying

So the big news is who is going to pay for the news? Charlie tells me the internet is taking over the world.

Usually if I want to know anything, I just ask Charlie. After all he picked the economic downturn before the World Bank and he told us about the signs of recovery ten weeks before the IMF worked it out. So when I asked Charlie about the future of news on the internet he referred me to his personal trainer Marty. I know Marty. He’s a cluey bloke - on top of everything and gets it all from the internet. Does he pay for it? No. Will he? Not likely. Marty talks like that - short sentences.

But someone has to pay. Good news is expensive. Someone has to dig deep to get the facts to see who is telling porkies. Louise hates me using slang so I will fall back on the line that Louise asked me to use. “Who is it that is breaking the ninth commandment?”

I know what you are thinking – “what is the ninth commandment and where is that Gideon’s Bible that I nicked all those years ago? “

And then I hear you say “Oh, doesn’t matter, I’ll just Google it.”

We know that the Gideon’s was free and we can be pretty sure that the Gideon’s people don’t mind us pinching them even though it costs something to print and distribute their 60 million copies of the good book.

But the Google info really is completely free. We pay for the printing if we want a hard copy and we pay for the distribution with our internet account.

Increasingly everyone is getting the information that they want, including the news, and not paying for it. But now the big publishers have started a world wide program to get readers to pay for the information that they have been giving away for the past ten years.

It won’t be easy. The move to the internet has been happening so quickly that publishers have redoubled their efforts to make real dollars directly from the virtual world.

Everyone, sellers and buyers alike, are going to web. The next big wave on the internet will be surfed by the retailers as they find clever ways to sell their products. And that’s a worry for the traditional news papers and magazines. The retailers have very big advertising funds that no print publisher wants like to see walk out the door as the classifieds have done.

And the ways to use the web are exploding as mobile phones continue perform more and more functions – everything from global positioning to sports telecasts – even phone calls. There are two million new handsets each year making a total of over 24 million mobile phones in Australia.

My bet is that one way or another we will all pay for what we use. Exactly how this is achieved is exercising some of the smartest commercial brains on earth.

I tried to convince the Editor to experiment with this column by publishing a blank space with a headline that is link to a paid website. He’s not quite ready for it yet, but I reckon his owner is.

And by the way, what about the ninth commandment? Have you got it yet??