I went to my first Xmas party of the year last night, meeting journalists and talking about 2009 and the year ahead. The year for many traditional publishing houses has clearly been a tough one, with the perfect storm of declining advertising revenues and declining readership as more of us turn to the internet to consume “free” news.
It was with some interest therefore that I read this morning that Google are to limit free access to online news. They have developed software that will allow publishers to limit the amount of material that we can access free.
This has got to be right for the industry. Although we have all embraced Google’s advertising sponsored free view of the world, the reality is that there is a limited pool of advertising dollars. If we want to maintain high standards of journalism,quite simply, we have to pay for them.
