Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation will lead other media companies into charging for their content online, his digital chief said today.
Jonathan Miller, chief digital officer of News Corp, told the Monaco Media Forum that the company which owns The Sun, The Times and the News of the World in the UK could not make the step alone and needed others to follow.
He said: ‘We will lead. There is a pent up need for this. There has to be a resolution for the free versus pay debate otherwise we cannot afford to pay for things like news bureaus in Kabul.”
Miller said Murdoch could soon remove his company’s content from Google ‘months and quarters – not weeks”, the Telegraph reported him saying.
He added that the current situation, where the value of ‘high quality content’was not recognised online was not sustainable: ‘I don’t believe the media industry can continue to exist in this way.”
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