BBC won't charge for online news says Lyons

Posted by Jennifer Lush on November 24, 2009 at 3:07 PM

The BBC has announced today that it will not charge for online news, despite accusations from James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, that it is "throttling" the market and preventing competitors from expanding online.

Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC Trust chairman, said the corporation has "no intention of diluting BBC commitment to universal access to free news online," words likely to anger the News Corp CEO, who is at the forefront of plans to begin charging online.

Recently causing a stir with his accusations that the search engine Google, is 'stealing stories' through its news aggregaton service, Murdoch has threatened to remove his newspapers from Google's results. Eyebrows were raised yet again over the last few days with speculation that Murdoch might enter into an agreement with Microsoft's search engine Bing.

Lyons said today that the BBC Trust "recognises external concerns over scale and growth of BBC online operations". But he added: "Equally, it's an immensely popular service with audiences and an important tool for the economy."

A similar announcement was made by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Managing director, Mark Scott, last month which declared that Australian national news service would also refuse to charge for its online content.

Speaking at the annual AN Smith Memorial Lecture in Journalism in Melbourne, Scott said that a fully paid online content model for media organisations was doomed to fail and that the ABC would not bow to pressure from commercial media outlets to go down this path.

"The public pays for the ABC to deliver distinctive, quality content to them - and if it is content we are creating and packaging for them now, they are entitled to view that content free of charge," he said, again presumably much to the dislike of Murdoch who owns several Australian newspapers, including flagship The Australian.

Source: Media Guardian