Last week Rupert Murdoch, chairman and managing director of News Corp, announced during an earnings call that the company is going to start charging for access to online content across all of its titles by mid-2010. As the biggest English-language producer of news content, News Corp owns British tabloid the Sun and the Times of London as well as the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and US broadcaster Fox News.

Murdoch made the announcement on August 5 while discussing News Corp's worrying year-end results – including a $203 million net loss in the fourth quarter and a $3.38 billion net loss for the fiscal year that ended on June 30 – results that may partly explain the move to charge for access to the firm's raft of high-profile media brands.  

And Murdoch says that today’s free-access Web model ultimately compromises the quality of content. “Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting.”    

News Corp will be relying on adding value to its news content to keep online readers from switching to free news sites. Murdoch said he was confident the company could produce “significant revenues” by charging for content that it would strive to make unique enough to meaningfully differentiate it from the competition.

“How is the Times going to make people pay, when you can read the [Daily] Telegraph for free?”, asks Waddick Doyle, chair of the global communications department at the American University in Paris, referring to two of Britain’s top daily papers. It is a question many media observers might well be asking.

Web users may simply be unwilling to pay for access to what was formerly free. Doyle says in order to get online users to start paying news sites for content, “they will all have to be charging”.

And that might be just what Murdoch has in mind. He has made it clear that he believes the new News Corp model to be the wave of the future, and that other media sites will soon follow suit. “If we’re successful, we’ll be followed fast by other media,” he said.

Murdoch may be leading a new charge toward a pay-for-access future, but those who came before him to challenge the notion that online content should be free were doomed to fail.

In a bid to boost cash flow as print newspapers saw sales slowing to a trickle amid a flood of free online news content, the New York Times began in 2005 requiring online readers to register and pay for access to its opinion and editorial pages via TimesSelect, although access to the news portion of its site remained free. The result of this experiment was dismal, and the paper soon reintroduced free access after being forced to conclude that most of its online viewers, at least, were not willing to pay – even for the celebrated New York Times op-ed section.

And few online news sources since then have been successful in making the news pay. Some have turned to advertisers to boost finances instead of introducing access fees. But turning a profit through ad revenue has remained elusive.

“Even the New York Times Online, which is the most-read online newspaper in the United States, has been unable to make a profit on online advertising,” says Doyle.  

He says what has done relatively well are sites like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Both use a partial-charging model, which charges readers for access to some portions of a website while allowing free access to others. Doyle says people seem slightly more willing to pay for financial sites with customizable web pages that offer analysis, stock tips and news alerts that could give them a real-time edge on Wall Street.    

Ahearn says he is a firm believer in the link economy, telling the blogosphere: “Please feel free to link to our stories – it adds value to all producers of content.”

If today’s free-access model remains unprofitable, and thus unworkable in the long term, it remains to be seen what could replace it.

Jean-Marc Vittori, a columnist for Les Echos, a French business broadsheet, says a successful paid-access model doesn’t exist yet, but inevitably one will emerge. “We’ll have to pay – but the question is how,” he says. 

According to Vittori, the expanding role of the mobile phone may be part of the answer. People are already willing to pay a dollar or so for the right to download a file, such as a song from iTunes, onto an iPhone or similar hand-held device. This may signify that a demand for pay-to-access news is already evolving as lifestyles get more mobile.  

Whether Murdoch’s current experiment succeeds or fails, he wasn’t the first to try to turn online content into cash – and he won’t be the last.