Go live

Simon Jenkins' rather quirky take on how newspapers could find new revenue streams without needing paywalls...


"The key must be to learn the lesson of the most tightly competitive medium of all: popular music. It has cast off its enslavement to recording studios and recast itself, almost in Victorian mode, as a mass movement for live audiences. Music online is all but free. Live costs a fortune. Young people will pay more for a gig in a club than for a Led Zeppelin CD"


"[Newspapers]... have let the torch of cultural championship pass to a new generation of promoters and impresarios. Local newspapers are quietly dying when they should be staging everything from commercial fairs to sporting events and arts and book festivals. There is money in all of them. Newspapers should not be investing in fancy printing presses but in the "long-tail" economics of live enterprise, with the printed word as a mere core activity"


Full article, in the Guardian, here.