As the Times and Sunday Times prepare to close their websites to the casual reader next month and start to charge its readers a fee, traditional and digital media world, as a whole, will be waiting with baited breath to see how it goes - it will be a pivotal moment.
Newspaper and magazine publishers have long argued that their content is worth a price - after all, they have writers, photographers and other staff to pay for - but it's at odds with the freedom mentality that grips the internet.
Something has got to give and I guess, even the hard and fast internet freedom-fighters must realise that at some stage, content will come at a premium but the question is, is now the right time to charge and...will enough readers pay and stem the (advertising) losses that printed media are incurring?
My personal view is there is still some way to go before the paid versus free battle is won or lost and there is still some potentially large financial and physical losses to be incurred.
I've held the belief - and this goes back to the the infancy of the internet in the UK - that large traditional print media companies will have to cut and cut and cut, to a point where there is viability and even then, these long established businesses will still be at the mercy of freshly digitally charged and youthful entrepreneurs, who know how to reach out to their target audience with the slightest and cheapest of infrastructure.
In less than ten years time (possibly five) there will be no place for the traditionalist in media; we will be in the new world where a journalist will not only know how to effectively apply an apostrophe, they will also be a whiz at coding an anchor or justifying a photograph while writing in plain text (although that's a simplistic example) and not to mention publishing content simultaneously to a number of social applications.
If you've got a keen interest in how garden media is going to develop then I would suggest you keep a watchful eye on the developments at News International as they bravely switch over to a paywall model - if it were to work then you can expect to start paying to read content on your favourite gardening site (not Landscape Juice though).
Owners of Amateur Gardening, IPC Media, restructured their whole operation last January and have now entered into a period of review for all of its 85 mixed media brands, that could see them sell off some of their titles to smaller publishers to focus on, in the words of chief executive, Evelyn Webster, "accelerating the development of our multi-platform offerings to our consumers".
The video from the Frontline Club is of a discussion with industry bloggers and analysts debating the launch of the News International paywall and what I've come to conclude, especially listening to the Times digital director Gurtej Sandhu, is that they are not ready and maybe they've rushed this through after Rupert Murdoch forced pay-per-view to the forefront?
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