Martin Belam illustrates the economics of pay walls

The relationship between scarcity and Price is a standard economic principle and can be related to the charging for online news.

Martin Belam seeks to illustrate this principle to demonstrate why Rupert Murdoch's paywall won't work and provides this image where newspapers from the UK, US, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong and India are all covering the same story.



And concludes that

when we think about asking the market to pay for newspaper content online, I think we have to look honestly at that content, and ask, what have we got that is unique and desired by consumers?

Deteriorating newspapers at the British Library

Nice post from Martin Belam who looks at the problems at the British Library over preserving newspapers.

He writes that

750 million pages of newspaper were described as "the most fragile" part of their collection by Helen Shenton, Head of Collection Care. It is a problem that makes freesheet ink rubbing off on your hands seem trivial by comparison.