Yes they do. Sorry, let me just adjust that. Yes, they still want what newpapers have always given them, they just want it in a different way. Look at the iPhone. Some say that it’s the new newspaper and they could well be right. Look at all the apps that are available for weather, headlines, stocks & shares and so forth. Spend a little time and you’ll soon have pretty much your own weekend broadhseet complete with the colour supplement, all in your pocket. The interesting thing is that none of these little apps seem to be coming from the big news publishers….

Over at a great blog I’ve started reading called The Recovering Journalist, written by Mark Potts, he talks about how out of touch he believes the big news publishers are in trying to get people to start paying for online content and how it’s just too late for that. He’s right.

Indeed, why charge anyway? It’s the advertising revenue that counts, so your advertisers won’t thank you for hiding your content behind a PayPal wall and narrowing the readership – advertisers want readers and and audience – a Great Big One, Please….

And as he rightly comments, the whole ball game is dependant on EVERYONE playing the game and joining in with the payment option. Given that newspapers are not reknowned for working together at the best of times, surely, as he says, it’s like herding cats. It will only take one to open the door and the whole thing will fail. The advertisers will flock to where the traffic is and the whole model will turn into a plnae crash…. And all this, of course, is assuming that the content is so vital that people actually want to pay for it in the first place….

So does this affect me? No, not right now, as I don’t supply newspapers, only monthly magazines. But I can see a time when it will. There are already free online motoring magazines of good quality to download and read. They don’t cost a fiver to buy, you don’t need to go to the newsagent and of course, they have added features such as video.

So if you’re a writer, does that mean you need to start learning how to flip burgers? No. As I wrote at the start of this post, people still want to read good content, it’s just that in a very short while, it’s going to be delivered in a different way. And depending on your mind set, that’s either very scary of very exciting…..