News Corp. posted a $203 million loss for its fourth quarter, which is down from a profit of $1.1 billion during the same period one year ago. It should thus come as no surprise that Rupert Murdoch plans to do something about that. We he has decided, however, has "Fail" written all over it. On Wednesday Murdoch announced plans to charge for online access to all of News Corp's media properties.

Murdoch vowed to charge for access to all the online content owned by News Corp., including their newspapers and television news channels, which goes well beyond his prediction from May that the company would test pay models on some of its stronger papers sometime this year.

Murdoch said:

"We intend to charge for all our news websites. If we're successful, we'll be followed by all media."

He added, that he predicts "significant revenues" from charging for differentiated news online, and warns that "the big competition will be coming from the BBC", which offers free online news. However, he said "Our policy is to win."

If Murdoch is successful and the paid content model works for him, it could start a new trend in online news, with other media outlets jumping on the paid access bandwagon. However, this plan seems more destined to fail and even more likely to backfire and spark further losses. Afterall, who is going to pay to read gossip in the New York Post or News of the World, when they could just go to a competitor like New York Daily News, or the National Enquirer instead? If it's a big enough story, someone else is also bound to have it. In fact, there's probably a handful of blogs that have the same scoop as well, and some like TMZ might even have more details.