If Rupert Murdoch is to make a success of charging for all his papers' content online, expect more attacks on the BBC

Who made the rule that everything on the internet should be free? It's the question that beleaguered media executives around the world are have been muttering to themselves for months now.

The only certain answer is that it was none of them, because when the decisions about internet strategy were being made in their organisations, none of the most senior bosses were particularly interested.

Now, hit by the double whammy of a cyclical advertising downturn and huge structural change, the news business is going through the same pain that afflicted the music industry. After years of hoping the problem would go away, news organisations are desperately reaching for the same strategy adopted by the music bosses: shutting the paid-for door after the free horse has long since bolted.

It's not the first time that news organisations have flirted with charging for online content. The New York Times hoisted a pay wall around its columnists, only to find that everyone stopped reading them. After their precious journo-stars started to complain, the Times abandoned the strategy, but it led directly to the birth of the Huffington Post, a free comment website that provides a far more wide-ranging daily analysis of the US political scene.

The (Murdoch-owned) Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have had limited success in charging for specialist financial news and comment. But the proliferation of free online sources, aggregated by the search giant Google, has doomed to failure any attempt by others to extend such charges to general news content.

Rupert Murdoch's announcement that all News Corp's newspaper websites – including the Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times in the UK – will charge by next year is therefore a sign that the news industry is running out of options. The old business model – cover price plus ad revenue – is bust: blown apart by the loss of classified to online networks and collapse of cover-price revenue due to falling sales. The hoped-for cash from online advertising has not materialised, at least not on the scale that would support the kind of journalism practised by the likes of Murdoch's papers, or for that matter the Guardian.

The elephant in the (British) room is the BBC – which is, in effect, the biggest free news website in the world. In a world where everyone is taking a gamble, one thing is certain: a new round of Murdoch-led lobbying to clip the BBC's online wings.

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