Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, blogged about his view on the Associated Press' move to start charging $2.50 per word if you want to quote five or more words from one of their articles. This is partially in response to the Ian Shapira article at the Washington Post about how Gawker ripped him off and how that's causing the "death of journalism." Mr. Shapira's view is, it seems, fairly widespread in the journalism world. Last week I watched a debate on Twitter started by Bart Hubbuch, the Mets beat writer for the New York Post, who was supporting Mr. Shapira.

The money quote from Mr. Ahearn's blog post (which Reuters will not charge me for):

"Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions."

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch is going to start charging online for ALL of News Corp-owned content fairly soon.

Now, I'm going to quote from an AP article, but only four words... "would bring liberal bias". Whew, I don't owe them any money for that. If I had used just one more word though...

What do you think? Will it work to charge online for content? Is there a way to make it work?