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….