Rupert Murdoch, is that the best you could come up with?

Why is it so hard to find proper criticism of Rupert Murdoch’s plan to charge for online content across all of News Corp’s websites?

Aside from a brief rubbishing in Valleywag, an admittedly incomprehensive search via Google has turned up very little in the way of people saying, ‘Stupid idea, Rupert’.

Not even Slate‘s Jack Shafer, critic of paid online models and sworn foe to Murdoch, has published a word against the planned move.

Granted, it’s Murdoch’s right to stuff up his internet businesses as he sees fit, but there seems to be more than a little too much optimism about this announcement.

Even the normally sane Andrew Sullivan is getting his hopes up, declaring: ‘It is the last stand of the newspaper industry as we’ve known it.’

I would love to see paid content models working for online newspapers and magazines. It would be very comforting indeed to learn that such a move would safeguard the future of journalism and provide a way for people in my line of work to make a living for as long as people seek news and information.

But I can’t see it working. And I’m surprised more people haven’t been pointing this out.

There are too many readily available news sources online these days to bother paying for any particular one — unless it’s something specialised that has a huge brand and well-heeled companies willing to foot the subscription bill for their employees. In other words, the Wall Street Journal.

But then, it’s not even the cost of subscribing, or paying for individual stories, that is the biggest problem. It’s the inconvenience of being confronted with a ‘Please pay $1.99 to read the full story’ message when a reader stumbles upon a news story by search, or clicks on a headline on a news site. That alone is reason enough for readers to look elsewhere.

And there will always be plenty of elsewheres. If it’s not the Guardian, or the BBC, or Reuters, or Slate, or Politico, or the New York Times (who have already experimented with various pay walls and given up on the idea, repeatedly), or the Huffington Post, or NPR, or whoever, then it will be the bloggers or the news services doing re-writes of stories that sit behind paywalls (we all know lines like this render attempts to put news stories behind walls futile: Sarah Palin will run for President in 2012, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal).

And if it’s not even that, then it will be bloggers and others copying-and-pasting entire news stories into their posts. There would also be a lot of money to be made for lite businesses that aggregate content and circumvent the need to visit (and pay for) the actual sites.

What media business people are struggling to come to terms with in the digital age is that offering free access to their online content doesn’t mean they’re giving away their content for free. It still comes with a price: readers are subjected to advertising that comes alongside, or is packaged within, the content they consume.

This is always how newspapers and magazines have made their money. The cover price likely doesn’t even go far enough to paying for the printing costs the paper the periodicals are printed on.

The hard truth is that the business model newspapers have operated on for the last few decades is broken. But doesn’t mean the death of journalism: excellent publications such as Slate, the Huffington Post, and Politico are doing very well without charging for their content.

It can be done, and increasingly news organisations are finding ways to thrive in the digital age. There’s more evolution to come, more growing pains to endure, before we see the best models finally in place. But in the meantime, Murdoch’s move is a big step backwards.