I was chatting with a friend today about newspapers. He was in the paper business so it’s an interest of his.

Like me, he finds subscription walls online irritating and is willing to circumvent hassles to get the information elsewhere. Like me he he’s willing to pay a small fee for content he wants, not what someone else wants to give him.

To that end we were discussing RSS feeds and subscription walls. A national newspaper telemarketing call offered him the hard copy edition for a dollar a week. I asked him for how long. He’d asked that to and it was indefinitely.
I asked what the catch was.
The bottom line is, literally the bottom line. Research indicates that fewer and fewer people are reading hard copy newspapers and the trend will continue.

Peter Chernin, who as the president of News Corp oversees one of the world’s biggest newspaper publishers including the Sun, the News of the World and the Times, said the explosion in free papers represented “the most significant demographic change” facing the printed press.

“The public always wants something for free. But I don’t believe they like Metro more. If we were handing out our papers for free or if the Metro cost money, they would not have an advantage,” he said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

I’m paying to read him say that. I pay electricity, ISP fees and for the sake of argument the hosting fees to put the link and quotes on this blog.
If I was on a subway or bus commute, I’d be listening to music and reading a book. Newspapers don’t fit well into those spaces.

Mr Chernin again echoed the views of his boss when he said that the electronic versions of newspapers would be more prevalent in the coming decade.

The News Corp chairman admitted in April that he “didn’t do as much as [he] should have” to confront the threat posed to his newspapers by the internet early on.

Mr Murdoch, whose News Corp also owns titles in the US and Australia, said in a speech to American editors in Washington that the internet was “an emerging medium that is not my native language”.

He issued a stark warning to the industry, arguing that the web was “a fast-developing reality we should grasp”.

“Certainly, I didn’t do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp away,” he said.

The digital revolution didn’t limp away, it galloped toward. My friend turned down the dollar a week newspaper offer. He doesn’t have time, he can get more than one slant on a story online and a computer now fits his lifestyle.

But Mr Chernin insisted the medium did not matter: “We’re not in the paper business, but the news business.”

Yes, sir you are. And being in the news business I would have thought about the bottom line of the digital revolution.