Murdoch wants more money for Kindle-WSJ

Well, Robert Murdoch wants more money for all his other news deliveries too, in general.
See the earlier article about Murdoch "rebuffing" the Amazon Kindle business model.  He said that Amazon wouldn't be getting his content, while others pointed out Amazon already had the Wall Street Journal content and books by Harper Collins.  If he didn't already know that (seems so), he may have gotten even more perturbed that this was a done deal in his case.  The sudden 50% increase in the Kindle pricing of the Wall Street Journal was made about 2.5 weeks later.  No other increases have been seen on the other Kindle newspaper offerings.

The Amazon Kindle Community forum response is something less than delight (with numerous reports of WSJ cancellations) over the WSJ price increase from $9.99/mo. to $14.99/mo. and one can wonder if Murdoch won't see a net loss on this.  He had bristled over the idea of the 30% or so said to be alloted to publishers while probably assuming that Amazon got the balance.
  As mentioned here in an entry posted on May 10

"According to a reliable source in the know, The New Yorker's Kindle split is divided 33% New Yorker, 33% Amazon, and 33% wireless carrier."

At Washington Post's paidcontent.org, Staci D. Kramer wrote, on May 6:

' Murdoch put it simply ...“We will not be ceding our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle.  We will control the prices for our content and we will control our relationships with our customers.

' Any device maker or website which doesn't meet these basic criteria on content will not be doing business long-term with News Corporation.”

' Take this one of two ways: News Corp. will keep pushing other possibilities until Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) backs down on its controls (good luck with that) or News Corp. will opt for a device it either owns or at least controls and can use in a proprietary way. '

But then, WP's paidcontent.org added:

' (The perils of writing live about Murdoch.  In further comments, he brushed off the idea of News Corp. investing in a device, saying the company may invest in something experimentally: “We're not appliance makers.”  A spokesperson later explained that the decision about how News Corp will handle this literally hasn't been made yet.
' But in nearly the same breath, Murdoch bragged about 360,000 downloads of the free WSJ iPhone app over the past three weeks; that would be from the App Store operated by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) with the same lack of control for News Corp.  It's as contradictory as offering the content-rich app for free and complaining about how the online business model has to change.

'   Then again, he promised that as soon as the technology is there, readers will be asked to pay “handsomely” for access. (It will be fascinating to see how many “free” readers pony up—and how much the WSJ charges.) '

  On May 11, Kramer wrote

' And, in today's reality, DJ [Dow Jones] is looking at any and every way to get more people to pay directly for access to the WSJ in a variety of forms, while encouraging current subscribers to pay even more by expanding offerings... '

For the WSJ-disenchanted who still want a good paper for financial news and analysis, try the Financial Times subscription, at $9.99, as they get an average of almost 5 stars from a good number of Amazon customer reviews.  The WSJ never did better than 3 stars in customer satisfaction.  The 14-day free trial applies to this also.

Kindle Offers Free U.S. News For a Year

With the April 15 release of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on the Kindle, owners can now get a full year of domestic newspaper subscriptions absolutely free.

Granted, cycling through 14-day trial subs of all 26 domestic papers Amazon now offers for the Kindle would certainly require some serious dedication. But the result would be a free education comprised of a broad range of news voices. Besides the old-school stalwarts like the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post, the fare includes more topic-specific rags like Investor's Business Daily and the Wall Street Journal, plus Politico, which is mostly associated with its online presence and not the free print version that makes the rounds in D.C.

For me, this represents a benchmark of sorts at a time when the newspaper industry finds itself in a life-or-death struggle. As someone who came from a print background, I've lamented the loss of one daily after another with colleagues. But I see a potential for rebirth in devices like the Kindle, which replicate the old model by charging a reasonable fee and "delivering" the paper to your virtual door.

The chance to nab a free year of newspapers might appeal to the freebie-lover in all of us. But I also hope it leads to more people exposing themselves to a (hopefully) higher standard of journalism, and ultimately choosing to support an important industry by picking a favorite and ordering a regular subscription.