I spent the day today working at home with my colleague Jez Collins and after a lot of planning, writing and brainstorming, we had a Skype meeting with Professor Tim Wall to talk about (among other things) the ongoing development of Masters programmes at Birmingham City University.

I’m already the award leader on an MA in Music Industries, and our first intake was in February. We’re recruiting for the September intake now.

It’s been going really well, and we have a small but really engaged group of music industry postrgrad students who are doing great work in Popular Music as Culture and a module in Enterprise. You can check out the students’ work at their blog.

Today we looked at two new developments for next semester’s intake – one definite, and one likely. The first of those is the MA in Music Radio. As far as I know there is no such Masters degree in the UK, focusing specifically on music radio. It’ll be great to bring some of the elements of music programming into the mix, as well as get the students working on practical projects and academic work in this area.

My colleague Sam Coley and a couple of our third year undergraduate students are shortlsted for a Sony Radio Award for a programme they made about the 30th anniversary of UB40′s Signing Off album, and Sam has been making a series for XFM recently, celebrating the 25th anniversary of classic albums. A great series to listen to… and a great person to have around when you’re delivering a course like this.

The other development – and it’s not finalised, but we’re working on it – is the Distance Learning version of the MA in Music Industries. We’re looking at developing a new module specifically in Online Music Enterprise as part of that distance learning course, and I think I’m right in saying it would be the first Music Industry MA to be delivered online. Given my set of interests, you can probably imagine how pleased I am to be involved in putting that together…

I’ve had feedback from quite a few people saying they’d love to do the MA in Music Industries, but they can’t move to Birmingham to do the course for whatever reason. Well – if all this goes to plan, we may just be within sight of solving that particular problem.

Exciting times…

Photo by YlvaS

I’ve been thinking a great deal about radio over the past few weeks. After having done the conference keynote in Auckland, a number of things have lined up to bring me back into that world, after a good five or so years being only peripherally involved at best.

I’ve been asked to write a book about radio in the digital age, for a kickoff. It’s early stages yet, and there’s no contract – but it looks pretty promising. In fact, it’s probably the book I should have been writing since about 2004. I’ll give myself 18 months to turn that one around.

I’ve also been doing a fair bit more academic work in the radio realm than at any time since I originally left New Zealand… and all of a sudden I’m doing a spot of radio consultancy here and there as well.

I did my usual, weekly four-hour jazz, bossa, rare groove, laid-back funk DJ set at the Hare and Hounds this afternoon, while people ate their Sunday roasts. There’s a playlist here, if you’re interested.

Now, because all this radio stuff is going around in my head, I’m thinking of ways of using that activity as the basis for a radio show of some kind. Since I’m playing records anyway…

Radio without additional effort
Here’s the scenario: I have these decks in front of me, and I have brought a pile of records – proper, 12″ vinyl, 33 1/3 rpm albums. Lots of them are rare and all of them are perfect for that Sunday afternoon vibe. In fact, Sunday afternoon’s kind of my specialism. I hosted It’s A Jazz Thing on George FM in the 2-4pm Sunday slot for about 6 years, and then did more or less the same thing on Rhubarb Radio a couple of years ago.

So there’s a four-hour mix each week at the same time. I’m in the back room of a pub which has been converted into a restaurant for the occasion, and people are eating, drinking, listening to my tunes, and talking with their friends and loved ones. Surely, an extra wire, or a little bit of internet technology could plug the output into a web radio stream and provide a low-effort, expertly curated jazz Sunday afternoon vibe for some radio station somewhere.

Could be a community radio station in Lithuania, a small college radio station in Minnesota, a local station here in Birmingham, a web-only station with no obvious point of origin – or whatever.

It just seems like an under-utilisation of media production for the records I play only to be heard in one room, when my laptop’s sitting right there…

Not really radio
A couple of things: first, I don’t talk during my DJ set. People are eating, and I’m more or less just providing the ambience (though it is a very cool ambience) – so there’d be no “Hi, you’re listening to X, that was Y, and coming up, I’m going to be playing some Z”. It’s just a continuous music mix for four hours.

Second, I’m not a DJ in the beat-matching, scratching, turntablist sense of the word. I play one record, and then I play another. I’ve put a lot of thought into what record comes next, and there’s generally no silence between the two – but that’s as good as it gets. One good record after another.

Third, I don’t play much in the way of new music. I would say over 90% of what I play was made between 1967 and 1977. As such, some of the records are a little bit surface-noisy. It all adds to the vibe.

It all takes place in a pub, through a simple mixing desk between two Technics turntables. I’m pretty certain a single feed off the desk could be piped into an upload stream at a decent and reliable rate that could be rebroadcast anywhere.

Of course, I could record it and then syndicate it out in some kind of reliable recorded music format, and I guess I could be persuaded to do that – but it’s the idea of it happening live that most interests me. The idea that someone is listening right now, and they know that what they’re hearing is happening somewhere in the world as they hear it.

So – that’s what I’ve got, and that’s what I’ve been thinking. Anyone interested in taking a feed and filling a slot on their station? Drop me a note.

I first met Nancy Baym on Twitter, and now we’re also friends on Facebook. We’ve talked via email about a couple of things as well. She’s a professor in the US and we have some mutual friends in common, many of whom one or both of us have never actually met in person.

She’s written an excellent book about how social relationships work online, and my friend Steve (from New Music Strategies) and I were both very keen to meet her when we went to Berlin this week for All2gethernow – and I was really glad we did.

It’s great to be able to make friends with people online, but just hanging out somewhere talking about stuff you’re interested in adds another dimension. She is, as she points out, a really cool person. Watch the video – and go read her book.

A couple of years back now (was it really that long ago?) my friend Stef and I made a website together.

It was called I So Wish, and it’s not online anymore (so that link won’t actually work), but when it was active, it was a nice little community of people who would wish for things, as well as try and help make each other’s wishes come true.

I So Wish was a really nice concept, and for the most part, it worked really well – and frequently brought out the best in people. Some incredible, generous gestures were made to complete strangers, and some amazing (and sometimes heartbreaking) stories revealed themselves through the wishes that were made and the conversation that followed on the site.

Stef did a brilliant job of the web development, and there were some great people who were actively involved as community leaders and enthusiasts who were very invested in the site – as well as some genuine commercial interest. But all the same, life sort of got in the way, and neither Stef nor I could really actively sustain and promote it and we both had other things to focus on.

Additionally, a friend of mine who we had asked to come on board as a community manager tragically died as a result of a life-long illness, and shortly thereafter, we decided to let the website close.

The how-to guide for wishing
While we were running the site, I wrote a companion piece – a sort of a ‘self-help’ style ebook about making wishes that come true. It was called, unsurprisingly, How to make wishes that come true.

While clearly an attempt to cash in on our wish-making public (or, if you prefer, make the site a little more financially sustainable) – the book’s neither as cynical, nor as wishy-washy as it sounds, and nor is it as flakey as most of the quasi-self-help ‘spiritual greed’ nonsense that tends to be inexplicably popular in bookstores these days.

Neither Stef nor I would put our name to something that we weren’t actually proud to be associated with – so inasmuch as that represents a mark of quality, there’s that.

Essentially, the premise is that simply closing your eyes and hoping the universe will do your bidding is pretty much delusional – but there are simple and practical things that you can do to help you achieve the things you want in life.

We released it as a sort of sideline to the website, but it occurs to me that since the demise of I So Wish, the book is effectively ‘out of print’ now (or whatever the digital equivalent of ‘out of print’ might be).

So what with all sorts of advances in the world of digital publishing recently I’ve decided to make it available again – in every ebook format imaginable – for your Kindle, your iPad or your desktop. It’ll be available via Amazon, in the iBook Store and elsewhere from next week.

But since you’re a reader of my blog, I’d like you to have it for free.

Get your free copy now
If you go to the book’s page on Smashwords (the service I’ve used to create the downloads), you’ll find it’s for sale for US$4.99 – but take the following discount coupon code and download the book for free:

Just copy that code and paste it into the appropriate box prior to completing your checkout (or remember it and type it in), and that will let you grab the book in whatever format you want at a 100% discount.

The code is valid until the end of September – and you should feel free to tell any of your friends that might find it useful or interesting.

Hope you enjoy it in whatever format you choose to read it in.

Photo by mkorchia

In a new Wired magazine article called The Web Is Dead, Long Live The Internet, Editor in chief Chris Anderson (author of ‘The Long Tail‘ and ‘Free‘) declares the demise of the web browser in favour of dedicated apps on devices such as iPads and iPhones (no mention of Android handsets, then).

It’s an interesting article – or rather, the first half is a reasonably convincing and interesting article, and the second half is a slightly less interesting, less convincing one. But Anderson’s technologically determinismistic search for cause and massive societal, cultural and economic effect gets in the way – and he ends up saying little, which is a shame, because there’s actually a good point to be made here – though it is one I’ve sort of made before.

In short:
1) the internet is like electricity;
2) individual pieces of software that use the internet (browsers, email clients, iTunes, etc) are like appliances that plug into that electricity; and
3) you CAN dry your hair with a toaster, but it’s not the best tool for the job.

Short for appliances
I’ve written before about my own preferred set of internet-enabled applications (or appliances, if you prefer) that I use. Here’s a quick list of what’s on my laptop, for instance:

For reading RSS feeds, I use NetNewsWire.
For email, I use Mac Mail.
For writing blog posts (like this one) I use MarsEdit.
For to-do lists, I use Things.
For moving files around, I use DropBox.
For finding and downloading images like the one above, I use Viewfinder.
For uploading video, I use the Vimeo Desktop uploader.
For Twitter, I use Tweetie.
For listening to music I don’t already own, I use Spotify.

…and so on. And I’ve also talked about apps I use on the iPhone – though this collection changes pretty regularly, as I fine tune the set of tools I like to use for different tasks.

It’s perhaps significant that many of them are portable versions of the software I use on my laptop, rather than iPhone-specific applications. I use NetNewsWire, 1Password, Last.fm, Spotify, Twitter, Mail, Dropbox, Evernote and Things, for example.

But as Anderson points out, although it’s something of a Swiss Army knife of software applications – the web browser is just that: an application – just as the more specialised, dedicated apps are, and it has at least one function that it performs better than any other appliance yet invented: reading web pages.

Don’t need a special hammer for 2″ nails
While we live in a Web 2.0 world of connection, user-generated content, mediated interpersonal communication and doing things on the internet (not, as Anderson suggests, ‘just web 1.0 that works’), there are still quite a few HTML-encoded, hyperlinked webpages that are just for reading, and perhaps responding to.

The stuff that’s generally considered to be 2.0 about the web does tend to fit the world of apps more readily. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (though arguably, that still works better in a browser), YouTube (likewise) and Last.fm all have individual iPhone applications. But where the web comes into its own is in a context like this one right here. Where you’re reading words that have been written by someone who both has something to say – and a ‘publish’ button.

There’s simply no need (or demand) for an Andrew Dubber’s blog app – or even a WordPress blog reader app – because the browser already does that job extremely well.

Next to sending and receiving emails (there’s an app for that), reading web pages is probably the most common web use out there. And web browsers are currently the most efficient means by which to do that.

And while yes, of course it’s possible to read this whole web post in your RSS aggregator (I don’t truncate my feed) and some people get it via email – these are neither mainstream, nor indeed terribly common. Most people who read this blog continue to do so on the website itself, and so can enjoy my typographical and layout choices.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that in all likelihood, most people who use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr continue to do so using the dedicated webpages, and they access them using a browser. That doesn’t mean that these people are behind the curve, necessarily – though I suspect most of them have spent less time paying close attention to their online workflow – and more time just ‘using the internet’ as it suits them.

Because as simple as an app may be – and some are very simple (the LinkedIn app, for instance, is a vast usability improvement on the website) – it does potentially represent a learning curve for the user. Or just, as one friend put it, “more stuff”.

Because over time, and thanks in part to people like Jakob Nielsen, there has emerged a common web design and usability vocabulary. Typically, if you know how to use a few websites, you know how to use them all. Currently, apps have their own internal logic and navigation systems that while usually simple, and dictated by the platform itself (iPhone apps have already established a set of navigational conventions), are interpreted by many users as ‘just another thing to learn’, when email and web have been more than enough to deal with, thanks very much.

It’s the future, it’s inevitable and it’s now
While Anderson allows that perhaps the web browser won’t die out entirely, he a) overstates the demise of the browser; b) overlooks the fact that there are an awful lot of webpages already out there; and c) cites the trend as an inevitable consequence (and triumph) of market capitalism.

This was all inevitable. It is the cycle of capitalism. The story of industrial revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others. It happens every time.

Perhaps. Actually, what also tends to happen a lot is that there are unexpected and disruptive technologies that radically transform both the media environment, and the business models that spring up around them.

Those business models are neither necessary, nor uniformly monopolistic, because those technologies are not uniformly profitable nor adopted by the masses. If only a thousand flowers bloom, then you might get a nice cottage industry out of it, but it’s hardly going to cause waves in the world of corporate ownership.

The only reason that a shift to apps and away from the browser could be said to be ‘inevitable’, was because it was actually observable – and has been for quite some time. In other words – it had already happened. That may be the most reliable method of ‘prediction’ certainly – but it doesn’t really count as describing the future.

Browsers were not, by any stretch, the first internet application, and nor were they the only ones at any point in their history. Anyone with any familiarity with IM platforms, Voice-Over-IP software, streaming media players, email programmes and FTP clients would make a distinction between ‘the web’ and ‘the internet’ if they paused to think about it for a moment.

Anderson’s rear-view mirror
Perhaps where Anderson’s article becomes most problematic is in his summary, where he confuses the medium with the content:

We are returning to a world that already exists — one in which we chase the transformative effects of music and film instead of our brief (relatively speaking) flirtation with the transformative effects of the Web.

In fact, the transformative effects are embedded and are becoming, finally, domesticated. That is – the internetness of online video, film, music and text is no longer quite so remarkable. We’re soaking in it, and we’re accustomed to it. But that does not mean a return to older media – but that those media have themselves been mediated.

The older medium, as McLuhan puts it, becomes the content of the newer medium.

But we tend to understand any new medium in terms of its predecessors. Like driving while looking in a rear-view mirror. Anderson expresses our ‘return to a world that already exists’ as if the internet has simply become a tube through which we get to look at older media. It’s not.

It’s the thing we’re experiencing – and the success of some types of apps (say – the Wired iPhone app) over another (the web browser) is neither indicative of a return to passive entertainment types that we used to prefer (and which have themselves been radically transformed by technological innovation in composition, production, distribution and consumption), nor is it a victory of monopolistic market capital logic over what are, essentially, social spaces.

Yes, the phenomenon is important, to the extent that perhaps too much attention has been paid to the web as a focus of study, rather than the environmental enabling technology of the internet – but it’s an ongoing part of the digital media environment we’ve been steeped in for a good 20 years now – and the ‘demise’ of the browser is neither really terribly surprising nor is it radically significant.

Nor is it, come to think of it, real.

One last point
Anderson is right: there is a change going on and it is a significant one. We’re moving from one platform in favour of a multiplicity of others. But that platform is not the web, and the others are not the apps.

What we’re moving away from (not entirely, of course, but with greater frequency, and significantly) is the personal computer of CPU, screen, mouse and keyboard, and towards interfaces that are portable, integrated and are interacted with differently.

The tool that, for a while, was the one main device that was powerful enough for us to use for both our work and our play, is now one of many devices that we use as we see fit for the different purposes that we have. We’re simply adjusting those ratios, as we move from device to device. Apps work better on phones than browsers do.

Anderson is saying ‘look at all the apps!’ without really noticing that it’s an iPhone and not a PC in his hand, or thinking about what that means.

Incidentally, don’t read this post as a critique of Anderson himself, who has written some of the most insightful and provocative articles on web culture, and whose The Long Tail book I insist my students read. Rather, this is just a flag to point to a bigger picture than this one particular article outlines.

We’ve recently moved into a new neighbourhood, and I’ve been checking out the local spots. I love the record store here (apparently there’s a better website on the way) – and our local pub is a fantastic venue for all sorts of great live gigs – the sort of international calibre stuff you wouldn’t expect at a local pub.

One great thing about Kings Heath is that there are also some cool cafés around, and I thought I’d check one or two of them out. The one above looked really promising – nice coffee, and the menu’s pretty good… but unfortunately – no wireless internet.

I spoke to the woman behind the counter, and she said that the boss wasn’t keen to install it, as it would only encourage people to just hang out with a single cup of coffee for ages – instead of eating and then leaving.

I do get the thinking behind that, but I just don’t think it makes good business sense anymore. I told her that their competitor just a couple of blocks away does have wifi, and on that basis alone, that’s where I would always choose to go.

She suggested I tell that to the boss.

So… I was going to write them a note to make the case for installing free, open wireless internet – but then it occurred to me that this is a broader issue. There are lots of good cafés not providing wifi, and potentially losing out because of it. So I wrote a more generic, general purpose letter that anyone can use.

Feel free to copy and paste the letter below, amend as required – and give it to the people at your local café. Not having wifi in a café should be as unusual as not having sugar.

Dear café owner,

Thanks for giving it some thought.

There’s another, similar letter to be written for hotels.

Charging for wifi in a hotel is like charging to use the electricity. In fact, one place I stayed in gave me a voucher for 10% off my next stay when I checked out, but charged me £20 for using the internet.

I explained that the voucher wasn’t enough encourage me to stay there again – but that the charge for the wireless internet (which was actually a smaller amount of money) would guarantee that I wouldn’t.

It seems like such a simple and obvious thing – but there’s a shortsightedness and pettiness that seems to go hand in hand with businesses that are public spaces, and charging for the internet (or not providing it at all).

I hope this helps a little, and that you find it useful. Do let me know if you use it…

Not content with having deleted my MySpace account last week, I’ve just deactivated my Facebook account. That doesn’t mean I’ve deleted it – it just means that it’s not currently active. Everything can be retrieved at a later stage, and I’ll still be friends with all the same people when/if I do return.

It’s just a bit of an experiment over the next 30 days to see whether or not I actually miss it. I use Twitter, email, blogging, and the odd bit of Skype to connect with other people. I don’t have a particular problem with Facebook – I just don’t find it as useful and engaging – and a lot of the time it just feels like work.

So – if I’ve disappeared from your social media world, I do apologise. It’s certainly not personal – and it’s probably not permanent… unlike my split with MySpace, which was (at least to me) more like a long-overdue and acrimonious divorce.

Photo by brooklyn

Today’s idea is about shopping for clothes at thrift stores or charity shops. There’s some great stuff out there, if you know where to look and how to look – and as long as they’ve got something in your size, you can grab a real bargain, construct a unique look that suits you, and help a good cause all at the same time.

But the problem with charity shops is that the ones with the best stuff seem to always be somewhere else – either in another city or, more usually, in a small town that you’re almost never likely to visit.

So today’s idea is about an online service that solves that problem. It’s a subscription service that sends you a parcel of great clothes in your size every month.

Charity clothing club
Okay, so I’m yet to think of a good name for this – but here’s how it would work.

You’d sign up to an online service with your name, address and so on. You’d indicate your chest size, waist size, shoe size, hat size – and some preferences (no Hawaiian shirts, for instance). You’d pay a monthly subscription fee, and you would be guaranteed a certain number of garments a month.

Young, clothing-conscious people (think art and fashion-design students, for instance) raid every charity shop in the land each month for the best pieces and these are collected at central depots to create the subscriber packs.

You could elect to get (for instance) at least two shirts and a pair of trousers every month, but you might also get a hat, or a cool belt with a giant eagle buckle every now and then. It’s pretty much a lucky dip.

But they’d turn up neatly packaged, nicely cleaned, pressed and folded – each package a surprise and delight.

You’d get some great clothes selected by people who know what they’re doing and love to rummage, you’d save a lot of money – and you’d be helping out too.

And if there’s anything that turns up that you don’t like – you could always just take it down to your nearest charity shop.

Like this, but a blog

A disclaimer about today’s idea: I’m on the board of advisors for Bandcamp, and I think it’s bloody brilliant. If you make music, and you’re not using it – you should get onto that.

Actually, today’s idea is not for Bandcamp, as it might seem – but for WordPress. What I’m proposing is a WP template with added cleverness. I’ve mentioned this to a few people before, but it hasn’t eventuated, so I’m posing it here as today’s idea.

So the gist is that you’d set up your WordPress account, install the template, and then just type your Bandcamp URL into the settings.

The template grabs the correct CSS code, it makes the background the same, the width the same, the font the same and the header the same.

Idiotproof band websites
So the idea is, because Bandcamp just works, it looks nice and it’s easy to use – why not make your whole music website look, feel and work like that?

With the WP Bandcampify template, it would look like its all part of the same thing – but it’s a WordPress site dressed up as a Bandcamp site. You can then have as many pages as you like, maintain a blog and when you click on the music page – there’s your music over at Bandcamp – but it feels like you haven’t moved.

You can do all the necessary trickiness with Widgets – and maybe even auto-embed a Bandcamp player widget in the sidebar. There are lots of options – but the key to this is make it as un-screwuppable as possible.

It seems like the last piece of the puzzle
Because you can already use custom URLs on Bandcamp, the web address can be the same. If your website’s at myband.com your Bandcamp page can be at music.myband.com.

And with the new image maps and even newer index page, the whole thing can be pretty much seamlessly integrated.

All we need for this to work is for someone with WP smarts to code the WP template with the extra cleverness in it – and then we could have a universe of bands whose whole web presence looks as lovely as their Bandcamp sites… even if their links are all pink (I’m looking at you, Peter…).

Are you that clever WP person?

Photo by mfophotos

Without wanting to tread on the toes of any of my colleagues – notably Paul Bradshaw, who is a world-beating expert on all things online journalism – I had a thought today about the crossover between newspapers and the internet.

Don’t think of this so much as an “idea” like the other ideas I’ve had so far. Think of this more like a thought experiment, and an invitation to have a conversation in the comments.

Personally, for what it’s worth, I believe the idea of a blanket paywall for online news content is a huge mistake, because I think it misunderstands the internet, media consumption in general – and specifically, the different ways that people use newspapers and news content.

And I think that if you do consider some of the ways in which newspapers are consumed, a slightly different possible approach to the monetisation and development of newspapers in the digital age starts to reveal itself… and I don’t think anyone’s thought of it yet.

Though it’s entirely possible that they have, but not told me about it.

The idea, in brief, is that physical newspapers come with a download code.

I’ll explain…

It strikes me that there are three main categories of news consumers:

1) News junkies and professional news consumers
These are people for whom a newspaper is a daily ritual, or part of their job. They tend to scour the pages of the newspaper from end to end on a daily basis, know the names of the columnists, and pay close attention to anything remotely news-related on any platform. It might seem like an obvious thing to say – but they actually read all of the words. News is crucial and closely-read.

2) Casual news browsers and commuter-readers
This category includes people that like to have a newspaper to accompany them for a particular part of their day. They like to know what’s going on in the world (or to have their views reinforced), and there may be a particular section that they’ll zero in on (Finance, perhaps – or Sport) but they’ll skim and skip bits, looking for ‘interesting’ stuff. News is entertainment or information, but on the whole, it’s once over lightly on their way somewhere.

3) Online-only readers
These are people who read closely, but usually quite specifically. I’d count myself in this category. Newspapers themselves don’t really mean anything per se – much less ‘sections’ – but articles are linked to, shared and discussed online. The articles themselves, rather than the publication, are the point. They are not consumed as gospel or as ‘broadcasted knowledge’, but provide the seed of conversation. I suspect there’s a significant overlap between this category and bloggers.

Just to be clear about this – as a Type 3 news consumer, I’d probably never read more than half a dozen newspaper articles a day. Sometimes just one or two. Often none. There is no way I will pay for them, so don’t try and charge me. But if you make desirable stuff in a quantity that meets a real need (ie: it’s amazing, and you can’t get it elsewhere), or creates a market, then by all means charge money for that.

Shared interests
The three different categories have different things in common. Groups 1 and 2 like having paper. At least for now, it’s the most pleasant way to consume large quantities of news – particularly on the go. A big newspaper, a cup of coffee and perhaps a train journey somewhere nice. You can underline things, make cuttings, do the crossword, and read long articles without eyestrain.

Groups 1 and 3 share an interest in the news as a matter of record. They want for journalism and reportage to be searchable, indexed, archived and available as reference material – though their requirements are different. Group 1 wants an archive, Group 3 wants a source.

Newspaper/online hybrid
My idea is for daily newspapers to hybridise their media. It would have these components:

1) A perhaps less weighty print newspaper publication that contains all of the news of the day, targeted specifically at category 1 & 2 readers.

2) Full replication of the print newspaper on the web, and for that to contain permalinks for sharing online and blogging by category 3 readers.

3) A unique code to be printed in each physical newspaper. That’s the crux of this idea: buying a daily newspaper gives you a code that accesses further rich material online – usually the heavier indepth analysis, investigative journalism and long form essays. You also have the opportunity to include multimedia content: recorded interviews, extra photography, discussion and so on. Everyone who buys the paper gets to read all of that content, and it’s all indexed, databased and searchable.

The newspaper IS the paywall
By making (seriously good) extra content accessible to all newspaper purchasers, you allow all readers access to that material- and that material can be trailed and promoted in the paper itself.

However, by making it so that all of the daily news reportage that appears in the print edition also appears online, you allow your online readers, linkers, commenters and (let’s face it) promoters to do what they currently do so well.

The selfish trap
Of course, the big pitfall here is the temptation for news organisations to remove perfectly good, linkable stuff (the kind that would fit into my usual half-dozen reads) and put it in the secure online-only edition, in order to try and get the category 3 readers to try and buy your dead trees. Don’t bother – we never will.

The only way this would work is for generous and useful amounts of content to be available in both ways.

And perhaps – for the diehard paper enthusiasts who somehow have all day every day to plough through 124 pages of information, opinion and rhetoric – you could provide a deluxe print edition of all the longer content via paid subscription, delivered to the front door.

A press for all types
By cutting back on the sheer volume of paper that you’d need to print in order to make a satisfactory publication for a type 2 reader and a compelling enough free proposition to make you the number one online news source for the type 3 reader – you have the opportunity to superserve the type 1 reader, without cutting off access to the real democracy-enhancing investigative stuff for the vast majority of type 2 readers who are your loyal customers.

If they have the paper, they automatically have the access, should they wish to go and find it. There is no additional artificially-created barrier to an informed populace. If anything, you’re improving matters for democracy.

You’d probably be a much greener proposition too.

But on those days where you have an interesting article in the free & print edition, and it tells of a solid 3,000 word context piece or a half-hour unedited interview with subject of that article – maybe on those days, I’ll pick up a paper on my way home so I can grab a code – and then use the paper to wrap up some broken glass or line a birdcage at some later point.

“So…” he asked optimistically, “is that newspapers solved then?”
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Having said all this, if you put Charlie Brooker, Rhodri Marsden or Mark Steel behind a paywall, I’d be very cross indeed. Think of them as key positioning statements for your brand, and spread them far and wide.