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.