Journalists! Now is the time to start your own news site.

Confusing their need for income with a desire among customers to pay for content, the papers are about to hand over their audiences following the lead of the Dirty Digger.

They made you and you friends redundant, they froze your pay, they made you write umpteen stories a day during 12-hour shifts in increasingly empty newsrooms. And all the while they creamed off ludicrous profits. Now they want the online reader to foot the bill.

It’s an enormous mistake but it’s great news for the future of journalism.

Murdoch’s wrong because everything about the net is moving towards sharing and the free movement of content. Hiding content behing barriers simply ignores how most people access it.

Murdoch, Lionel Barber and the other pro-chargers assume that because they need a lot of money that people will pay to access news and comment online. But that’s not how life works. Something is only worth what people will pay for it.

Charging for news has alwyas been bonkers. How can you put a barrier round “Lord Jones is dead”? It is instantly, immediately copiable without contravening any known or possible copyright laws.

In essence, the problem is that of Spotify vs iTunes. Spotify lets you listen to  unlimited amounts of music from a vast playlist. It’s free but the catch is you don’t get to download or keep any of it. If you want to own it, you need to hop onto iTunes and buy a download.

The problem is that online news and comment is like most music on Spotify – you access it once and walk away. Unlike with music, though, there are very, very few news or comment items that you would pay to keep for ever.

However, news media companies do have access to a suite of products that people will pay to keep – and that are more suited than the web to the presentation of all that high-quality fabby content that the moguls have been boasting of: print.

You see, it’s not the online products that are broken: it’s the print ones. Just because large numbers of readers don’t like the one size fits all version doesn’t mean that that’s it for print. And it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly going to want to pay for material online.

So what’s the good news for journalism?

Well, when J Arthur Reader pops online to enquire after the health of Lord Jones, what will he do when he sees that all the “Lord Jones is dead” stories from the mainstream news organisations are behind payment barriers? Will he A) get out his chequebook or B) read the story for free somewhere else?

And what is to stop journalists from setting up their own nimble news enterprises to supply that free news? (Sure there’s the BBC but it can’t do attitude or opinion.) These specialist enterpises would have no legacy costs and which could make use of targeted print products to boost revenue. They could even co-operate with other non-competing enterprises to buy back-room services (ad sales, printing, IT).

When the big boys shoot themselves in the foot, it’s a great time to challenge them to a race.

But this parody of a BNP video cheered me up greatly.

Remember, in the words of The Angelic Upstarts, “fascism doesn’t start with concentration camps, that’s where it ends”.

Sources close to the cacao-based container said it was “deeply concerned” about its standing within British politics if it continued to be associated with the Brown regime. 

This shock defection follows a slew of similar movs by key figures, including:

• One Legged Man at an Arse-kicking Competition
• Inflatable Dartboard
• Spare Prick at a Wedding

Friends of the PM moved to play down the split, saying: “I, uh, I mean the Primer Minister sees this as an opportunity to promote thrusting, new talent such as a Catflap in a Submarine and Fart in a Wind Tunnel.”

The row overshadowed an attempt by Mr Brown to defy his critics by organising a piss-up in a brewery – an event which featured a range of beverages supplied by the Temperance Society.

An earlier attempt to find his own arse with both hands and a map floundered due to a compass error.