March 2010

Are people ready to pay for online news?

Newshounds have long been able to consume as much news as they want online for free. That trend could be about to end as some newspapers start to charge for the content found on their websites. Publications across the world are exploring ways to make money from the web after seeing a fall in advertising revenues. Jonathan Hewett, director of newspaper journalism at London's City University, said technological changes in recent years have been "immense". "That's part of why newspapers are facing financial and economic challenges, in that a lot of advertising started to migrate online." "What newspapers have really been struggling with is 'What's our destination?' and 'What is going to make it a sustainable business?'" he said. "No one has the answer yet, if there indeed is an answer. It may be that we are moving towards different models for different types of news media," he said.

New EU rules limit Internet charges for cell phone

Mobile phone operators must now limit how much they charge customers for using the Internet within the European Union, after new rules went into effect Monday.

Customers have until July 1 to set a maximum monthly cost with their network, and those who do not will by default have a euro50 ($68) limit set. Networks will send a warning when customers use up 80 percent of their allotment. At the limit, they will be cut off. The European Commission has pressed networks into slashing roaming charges, leading to a 35 percent drop in the average cell phone bill to about euro20 a month, according to EU data.

British Library creates archive of defunct Web

The British Library is creating an archive of the country's defunct Web sites to preserve snapshots of the ever-changing Internet for posterity.

The library is already charged with keeping a copy of every published work distributed in Britain and Ireland. In 2003 that directive was extended to electronic materials such as compact discs and online publications. Now the British Library said it has begun trawling through the Web and making archival copies of sites of historic interest - including those once maintained by now-bankrupt companies such as Woolworths, Web pages spawned after the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks in London and Internet coverage of Britain's last general election that year.

T-Mobile and Orange merger gets European OK

The European Commission has given its approval to the merger of T-Mobile and Orange's UK subsidiaries, which will create the largest mobile operator in the country. On Monday, the Commission said its approval for the deal was conditional on the amendment of T-Mobile's network-sharing deal with 3 "to ensure that there remain sufficient competitors in the market", and on T-Mobile and Orange giving up a quarter of their combined 60Hz of spectrum in the 1800MHz band.

Benton

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