Here is the News

As Private Eye would call it, "The Street of shame" has had a couple of potentially major developments this week.

Firstly News International announced that they would put the Times & the Sunday Times behind a pay wall. This means that in May they will re-launch the papers websites and that you will need to register thereafter to access them. Then in June you will need to pay for your registration to work, either £1 per day or £2 for a week. They also hinted that their other two publications namely the Sun & the News of the World might follow in due course.

Rupert Murdoch firmly believes that putting papers behind a pay wall is the future, others such as Emily Bell, the Guardian news and media Director of digital content, strongly disagree. In reality only time will tell, but my instinct is that Emily Bell is more likely to be proved correct than Murdoch. My reasons for this are that firstly my surfing habits are such that I view the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times and the Daily Mail websites most days in addition to my homepage which is the BBC. In addition, I increasingly use other media outlets such as Twitter and Google. A newspaper, as the name suggests, should initially tell you the news and in this age I can find that in number of places, so the loss of the Times will be disappointing, but not sufficient to make me pay for the content that I shall lose. I used to buy the Times newspaper most days until about 18 months ago, now I find the news via Twitter on my phone at lunch time.

Secondly there will be add-ons to the Times digital content, such as an e-paper and no doubt an iTunes app on which to access it, ahead of the launch of the iPad in April/May. But there is already an excellent Guardian app, which ok you have to pay a one off fee for, but thereafter the content is free. It's so good that my eldest son said he wanted an iPod touch just to be able to access it! There are others too and with free content as well. In April the BBC News will also launch its iTunes app. The Times will be an expensive offering in an otherwise free marketplace.

Finally, the Times does have great writers that readers do follow and they hope that they will be a significant factor in people paying to be able to continue to do this. This may work, but will it be able to stop other sites allowing access to this content through other ways, i.e. is the pay wall security going keep the content behind it? It may well at the outset but for how long? And if those writers audience reduces by 95%*, will they be happy to stay behind the pay wall? I know that they will still be read in the actual paper, but the bigger potential audience is now via the web and if that reduces....

The second potential development is Alexander Lebedev buying the Independent and Independent on Sunday for £1. He previously bought the Evening Standard for £1 and then re-launched it as a free paper. Word on the street is that Lebedev may do the same with the Independent, although that could be harder to pull off. Will super markets, for example, stock a free paper alongside ones that they make money on? On the plus side, if you had a free copy of the Independent to read rather than the Metro, would you happily put it under your arm at the station? I guess the big question is would you read a free Independent over the Times or the Telegraph that you still have to pay for? It could be of course that giving away a free paper copy becomes increasingly irrelevant, as the digital version will, in probably a shorter space of time than we expect, become the version of the publication that we read more frequently. Which takes us back to the Times....

*Business models for pay walls work on the basis that a 5% take up is good enough to make a profit.

White blank page

This week I was 51 which when you write it down sounds old, but I still feel 25 so that's all right. (Yes before you comment, I know I look 75)

On Thursday night, I went with my sons to see Rob Bell speak. He's probably the best communicator I've ever seen, using both words, his physical body, pictures and video to support his point. He spoke for two hours but the time flew by and we all came away with a real sense of inner peace. The evening was titled "Drops like's stars" which comes from his 3 year old nephew staring at rain drops hitting a deck outside his window and shouting "stars, stars, stars" as they hit the ground. He didn't see rain drops he saw stars. To do the talk justice would need pages, so Google him, read the "Drops like stars" book or when the DVD comes out see that, you won't be sorry. Oh by the way he's an American preacher but in no way like any preconceptions you have of any other American preacher. To me his style is closet to Steve Jobs with jokes.

Musically I've discovered Mumford & Sons and "Explosions in the Sky", the latter courtesy I think of Rob Bell's iPod that was playing the music before he came on stage. We asked the road crew who it was it was playing! Check them out on Spotify; you do have Spotify don't you?

The spirit of radio

This week the BBC announced that they were going to "re-arrange the deck chairs", by closing two radio stations, close down part of its web-site and cut back on importing TV shows. The savings will be re-invested in "quality programming" which is a relief as "rubbish programming" would have been less appealing.

I never listen either of the chosen radio stations (6 Music & the Asian Network) or explore the parts of the website to go. I probably should watch one of the imported programmes (Madmen) but otherwise it doesn't affect me at all.

The loss of Radio 6 music has, however, instigated a "cause célèbre" campaign on twitter and in the media to keep it alive. The main reason being that, it's small audience are very loyal, it is one of the easiest places to listen to non-formatted radio, with a good chance of hearing something new and it fills the gap between Radio 1 & Radio 2. Now to be honest, I rarely listen to music radio at all these days, so I can't really comment on the rights and wrongs of that argument. It does occur to me, however, that in this age of the internet, there are probably far more places to hear new music than there ever were. The "gap" issue makes sense and certainly my limited knowledge of demographics, target audience and all the other things that focus the minds of radio controllers, leads me to believe that there isn't anything else doing what 6 Music is currently doing.

The problem has been the listening figures and that in turn leads to how you can access it, as it is only really available on a DAB radio or online. While at home, I only listen to the radio on a DAB set, but I'm an exception and the majority of people still use FM for their daily intake, which excludes    both these stations.

So is the BBC saying that DAB is dead? Well the evidence is no, as Five Live for example don't quote their AM frequency in trails. They say "on DAB, digital TV and online" these days. Furthermore the Government planned switch off of FM/AM means that unless online and mobile access completely takes over, then DAB has to have a future. Mind you when DAB was launched, no one had thought of listening to your radio on your mobile phone, so the alternatives to DAB are already giving it a run for its money and that competition will only get more intensive. The one saving grace that it has is that car manufacturers are now putting DAB radios into new cars. I'm sure that one day (and probably quite soon) we will stream internet radio via 3G into our cars, but in the mean time DAB will be the new technology that we will explore on the move.

As a non listener, a bit of me hopes that 6 Music will get a reprieve, to take the benefit of that opportunity.