Hang on a minute, this guy has a really good point:
“A small levy on UK broadband providers – no more than £2 a month on each subscriber’s bill – could be distributed to news providers in proportion to their UK online readership. This would solve the financial problems of quality newspapers, whose readers are not disappearing, but simply migrating online. There are almost 20m UK households that are paying upwards of £15 a month for a good broadband connection, plus another 5m mobile internet subscriptions. People willingly pay this money to a handful of telecommunications companies, but pay nothing for the news content they receive as a result, whose continued survival is generally agreed to be a fundamental plank of democracy. A £2 levy on top – collected easily from the small number of UK service providers (BT, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk etc) who would add it on to consumers’ bills – would raise more than £500 million annually. It could be collected by a freestanding agency, on the lines of the BBC licence fee, and redistributed automatically to “news providers” according to their share of UK online readership.”
It is true that newspapers (and news journalism in general) is suffering as their revenue streams dry up. It is also true this is a bad thing! Having great networks, like the Internet, but nothing but rubbish, shallow content, is no good at all.
The question is how do we guarantee good content, which will cost, when the distribution is essentially free? A fee on broadband connections to fund journalism makes at least as much sense as the TV licence to fund the BBC. In fact I think it makes more sense!
Also note - this isn't a Guardian specific thing, this would benefit all news papers and as a result everyone else.
