Published 17 June 201019 June 2010 · Main Posts Meanland extract – The great paywall of Murdoch Jacinda Woodhead Murdoch wants to put our news behind a paywall, beginning with The Times and The Sunday Times, via a new payment model supposed to kick in in the very near future. Doubtless this is something he’s been planning since his first forays into the internet – like the purchase of MySpace – proved financially fruitless. Bloomberg’s Matthew Lynn claims the project is doomed to failure: It’s too late to start charging for newspapers online. The content isn’t good enough, and newspapers themselves are a product of technologies that simply 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. For some unfathomable reason, media barons are approaching news in the electronic frontier dressed in the same expectations they had of the print medium, even though the information works in a completely different way. Originally, the newspaper was a regular publication of current and topical issues and coverage designed, for the most part, for the general public. They first began to appear in the 17th century, as printed matter, coinciding with the invention of the printing press, although there had been previous circulation of handwritten newsheets and bulletins. In the 1800s, newspapers became cheap enough to mass-produce and consequently available to a much wider and more generalised readership. Read the rest of the essay over at Meanland. Jacinda Woodhead Jacinda Woodhead is a former editor of Overland and current law student. More by Jacinda Woodhead › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 28 March 202428 March 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. First published in Overland Issue 228 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.