The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has delivered a riposte to Rupert Murdoch's campaign to introduce paywalls to newspaper websites, claiming that it could lead the industry to a "sleepwalk into oblivion".
Delivering the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture at London College of Communication today, Rusbridger said that universal charging for newspaper content on the internet would remove the industry from a digital revolution which is allowing news organisations to engage with their readers more than ever before.
Rusbridger described universal paywalls as "a hunch" and said that the newspaper industry would learn valuable lessons from trying different business models, including staying generally free while charging for specialist content or asking readers to pay on different platforms, such as mobile.
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"If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world."more, including video of the lecture:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/guardian-editor-paywallsIt's nice to know that one media mogul understands what the web is for, what it could and should be.
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