"The Irish Times will publish under its own title online from Monday morning with the launch of a new site for the newspaper, www.irishtimes.com . Access to the site will be free."

[Several new US free newspapers] "share a webby characteristic that’s radically different from the typical newspaper: They link. To the competition. Like crazy."

"News International, owner of free daily thelondonpaper, and Associated Newspapers (London Lite) are participating in a ‘phoney’ expansion was in the UK. Both companies are trademarking their brands and registering Internet domain names in several are

How to (ab?)use the Wall Street Journal’s first-click-free approach to Google News and Digg to get free access to the bits behind the paywall …

"Many alternative futures beckon journalists. We just don’t know - depending on whether we are in TV, radio, local newspapers, national newspapers, consumer magazines, B2B magazines, or whatever - which version of that future will prove to be our destin

Local aggregator vs local paper: "NewZjunky has very little information about itself, but it appears to be a sort of anti-Times… a Drudge for Watertown, with links to public records, TV sites, and obits from every funeral home"

A local newspaper in upstate New York which still has a paywall is being vastly outperformed by a local news aggregator site with a tiny staff.

"Electronic Arts, the computer game publisher, has signalled its intent to embrace new, internet-based business models, announcing a version of its popular Battlefield title that will be distributed free online."

"Readership will get another boost starting Tuesday, when TheAtlantic.com will abolish the fire wall that has allowed only subscribers to the print magazine to see most of its articles online. It will make its archive accessible, too."

Oh if it were true! Think of the fun we could have had digging up all the old anti-freesheet quotes from O’Reilly & Co.

Justin Fox: "News was already pretty close to free long before the Internet came along. It was free on TV, free on the radio, and effectively free in newspapers when you consider all the valuable stuff that came packaged with it for 25 or 50 cents"

David Lazerus: "blogs will continue sprouting like crab grass throughout the electronic ether. Soon, the line separating quality journalism from utter hokum will be too blurry to discern." (I discern some hokum!)

"The Swiss town of Sitten, in Wallis kanton, wants to introduce a policy that is meant to make distribution of free dailies difficult and expensive … "

Jaron Lanier: "To help writers and artists earn a living online, software engineers and Internet evangelists need to exercise the power they hold as designers. … We could design information systems so that people can pay for content."