Award-winning writer and journalist Heather Brooke, who recently published the book ‘The Revolution will be Digitised’, was a fan of  the Guardian’s ‘open journalism’ philosophy, but she has had a change of heart and recently labelled it “a failed business model”.

The Guardian’s open journalism initiative essentially articulates its view of the future of journalism, as free and open, in opposition to the growing spread of paywalls in the UK and the US. Read More »

The Times has given an update on digital subscription numbers and says  The Times and Sunday Times now have 131,000 digital subscribers across all platforms.

That is an improvement on figures it gave in February when News International said its two UK newspaper websites behind paywalls had 119,255 digital subscribers for The Times and 113,818 for the Sunday Times. Read More »

News International’s experiment with a non-penetrable paywall around websites for The Times and Sunday Times has been a failure, while the rise of Mail Online has been the “world success story”, according to former Guardian leader, Tim Brooks. Read More »

A reminder from the New York Times for those who are banking their future on online advertising: revenues can go down as well as up. The media group reported digital ad revenue declined 10.3% across the company and slipped 2.3% at the division housing The New York Times and the Boston Globe.

Paid subscriptions, however, continue to rise. Paid subscribers to digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions of The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune hit approximately 454,000 as of March 18. Read More »

An entertaining rant recently appeared from internet sceptic John MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s Magazine, who believes the internet is out to put him out of business (he might be right) and where he compares it to nothing more than a giant photocopier that is stealing the life from his magazine.

Called ‘Internet con men ravage publishing’ he accuses those who give free content away, he points to the Guardian and others, of being  ideological radicals and internet boosters who are doing nothing less than promoting the death of print. Read More »

The Mail Online appears to have secured its place as the world’s biggest online newspaper as it overtakes the New York Times’ in terms of daily visitor traffic for the first time, according to figures from Comscore.

In February it racked up an average of 6,265,000 unique visitors a day, compared with 6,239,000 for the The New York Times. Read More »

The New York Times plans to cut the number of free articles it gives away to readers online from 20 to 10, but crucially the site will still remain open to social media when it comes to sharing.

At its upper limit 20 free articles was, perhaps, too generous a number and possibly discouraged people from subscribing although the latest numbers it has released suggest otherwise. Read More »

The Los Angeles Times is to become the latest major online newspaper to put up a paywall. It announced its plans at the weekend and says it will begin charging from next week.

Like the unrelated New York Times, the LA Times has opted for a social media friendly metered paywall and plans to charge an initial rate of 99 cents a month before rising after a four week trial. Read More »

Interesting move by The Sunday Times today. It reacted to the outpouring of tweets following the death of war correspondent Marie Colvin in Syria by putting her final report for the paper outside of its paywall.

There was a mass of tweets this morning as the tragic news broke of the death of the long time and highly respected Times journalist who was killed in the besieged city of Homs along with photographer Remi Ochlik after a shell hit the house they were sheltering in. Read More »

I’ve written a number of blog posts about how, in my opinion, The Times is missing a trick by making its paywall impermeable to social media or put another way how it is anti-social media.

I’ve written how its anti-social media paywall model was rejected by other parts of News Corp and how the Times and The New York Times compare (social media Vs anti-social media).

However, it has emerged that the News International-owned Times maybe about to change that policy and allow a little social media light in and its readers to share some articles. Read More »