Paying for news is doomed, isn’t it? On The Times, paywalls, porn and iPads

The Times and Sunday Times are doing the paywall thing from June. I’ve written a wee bit about it:

What we do know is that publishers need to do something now – or at least, they do if they want to avoid the same fate as the record industry.

The businesses aren’t identical – with newspapers, the people giving stuff away for free are the newspapers, not pirates – but the imminent iPad could be as much of a doomsday device as the iPod proved to be for the record business.

The iPad is a credible alternative to print, a device that’s usable for reading in a way laptops and desktops simply aren’t. If it, the next Kindle or some other new device takes off as a newsreader while free access remains the norm, then what little money’s left in news will be diverted from the content creators and into the pockets of the hardware firms.

It may be too late for the news business, of course. They’ve been giving their stuff away for a very long time now. If you’d been working for free for a decade and suddenly asked your boss to pay you, he’d probably tell you to piss off.

Craig Grannell, on the same topic:

Most online ‘journalism’ is bullshit, with people frantically copying and pasting stories without bothering to do any investigation or check any facts, and that’s because they’re being paid a few quid for a blog post (if that), rather than a decent amount of money to write some informed, professional copy.


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