So Rupert Murdoch is planning to be the first mover in putting newspaper content behind a paywall. Well as Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter said today, “it’s like trying to put the genie back in the bottle”.

This means you will have to pay to read content on all of News International titles like The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World.

For over a decade the public have benefited from this free up to the minute news and it has set a precedence and now it is expected, if they had charged for content from day one it might have been different.

The only way such a model could work is by a micro transaction pay model, whereby news is consumed on demand rather than a flat subscription. Let’s face it, all these titles are general news title with commentary, they are not specialist like The Wall Street Journal, I can certainly see people paying for content on that site.

If Mr Murdoch does make such a move, he is either very brave or misguided. Who knows once he makes the first move other titles will follow. Biz Stone is right, he should be devising a model that will make him a lot of money out of the huge traffic that these websites generate but coming from an old school background of print, it is sometimes hard to adjust and accept that people can get all that great journalistic content for free.

The simple fact remains, people will go elsewhere to get their news and the BBC remains their biggest threat.

This is a period of great change and we are witnessing the rebirth and death of many traditional mediums, what will come out at the end is anyones guess….

When I was an apprentice scanner operator/retoucher/planner (stripper) I used to get a great sense of achievement when finally producing a set of colour separations that were ready to go to plate making. In those days the job was highly skilled and you could earn good money, I remember scanner operators in the Eighties earning 70-90k a year in London.

It might take a whole day to make a double page spread of a magazine and a lot of expensive film intermediates such as masks.

Typically the process might consist of:

Scanning

• Scale film transparencies to artwork from ad studio or publisher
• Clean and mount transparencies onto scanner drum and load film into recording drum
• Set up scanner by analysing pictures setting highlight and shadow detail
• Scan and then unload film into chemical film processor

Planning

• Photograph artwork on large format vertical camera and process film through processor
• Create masks by cutting with a scalpel
• Use brushes and opaque paint to mask areas such as hair on backgrounds
• Combine typesetting with separations
• After perhaps some 50 sheets of contact film merge with colour separations to create a four colour set of master films

I see the London Lite might be gone in the next few months, this is the second free sheet to finally throw in the towel if this proves to be true, Associated Newspapers have been losing a reported £10m a year even though they have a 400,000 circulation. The first to go was Murdoch’s London Paper a few months ago. This leaves the Metro and the recently free Evening Standard the only free titles in the capital.

I got very tired of reading The Metro, London Lite or London Paper, they all follow the same banal formula with bite size news and pictures of cute kittens, I only took it so I could read something on the train or the tube. In comparison The Evening Standard is a proper paper and they have not diminished its pages (amazingly) but made it free and with a 600,000 circulation now compared to London Lite’s 400,000. Ironic that both the London Lite, London Paper and Metro have heavily impacted the Evening Standard but it looks to me ‘what goes around come around’ and I can see The Evening Standard becoming the ultimate winner in this battle.

This is cool 21st century application of the Pantone swatch book on iPhone, check out the video

and if you have no clue how colours go together it even does that for you.

If you want to use a lot less ink (especially on inkjet printers, I always seem to be paying the equivalent of a new printer each time I order new ink) try EcoFont, you can use it for your everyday printing.

You should also try to print 2 sides to every page (if you can work it out)

Ecofont

Here is a map showing recent print factory closures in the UK, sober reading!

I have recently been mulling over purchasing a Kindle Reader. I already have an iPhone 3G which is quite a revolution, but it can be slow to load web sites when not in a WIFI area and at the end of the day looking at web sites on a relatively small screen only becomes a chore eventually.

However my interest in Kindle has been re-ignited recently when I heard that it was to be offered in the UK and with over 230,000 books and newspapers and magazines available to download it is another step closer to an e-paper society. I was especially interested to hear about the screen that is non-glare and can easily be read in sunlight, a big problem that has persisted with laptops.

Although still mainly with a US focus I can see this being a big seller, take a look here for the video

Newspapers are cautiously welcoming this as a new way to monetise newspaper content online as it has the same look and feel of a conventional newspaper.

Personally I can see it as another channel to consume media which will fulfill a niche in our ever busy lives, its especially attractive with its very long battery life and as my bag weighs heavy on my shoulder loaded with books I am considering a purchase of this device.  But I do love my Sunday Times or Sunday Independent in bed of a Sunday morning, the last thing I want to do is look at a screen, like I do all day at work!

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I see that jobs are in jeopardy at the printing arm of Trader Media Group. This is another example of how classifieds are moving more and more to the Internet.

However as I learnt in my previous job running a large classifieds site, you cannot make the same kind of revenue online as you can selling a classifieds newspaper and this will ultimately see organisations such a Trader Media contract to bring itself to a point whereby the new online order becomes profitable.

My 22 month old son, having a bit of an accident in the snow!

There is no doubt that the UK Printing and Publishing Industry will see further declines in classified advertising because of the downturn in job vacancies, car sales and house sales. Advertisers will look for more cost effective means of advertising exacerbating the drift of classifieds to the Internet. It is estimated some 200,000 jobs are dependent on the UK newspaper press industry out of a total of around 316,000 printing jobs.

There will always be print. The internet serves as just another tool to which classifieds is ideally suited because of the length of time the ad can be online for, the low cost, the almost unlimited text and image real estate and the searchable nature of its architecture. 

Print needs to build on its core strengths. I myself do not want to read a newspaper on the Internet or on a laptop on the way to work.  A newspaper does not need a power supply, can be read in bright light, is bio-degradable, light and would not blow up if I spilt my coffee on it! Newspapers are great for reading commentary and in depth journalism and they need to build on that, increase circulation and re-appraise the classifieds conundrum