Dominic Young

Writings and more

recent posts

about

I’ve been around the news media and the internet since the beginning. I am interested in copyright as the basis for a thriving and balanced creative sector and society. Also interested in how the failure of copyright and other laws has led to terrible outcomes for the internet and everyone who uses it. I’ve done a lot of things around these issues.

Category: Newspapers

  • Netflixifying news? Think again…

    “Netflix for News”. That’s a phrase I’ve started hearing in the last month. It refers to an idea about how to save the news industry. I think most people who say it are suggesting a single subscription which users would pay, but which would give them access a wide range of news sites – a…

  • So, saving the media. How?

    How to save the media and transform the internet, part one

  • Were newspapers wrong about online? Kinda…

    Were newspapers wrong to go digital? asks Roy Greenslade, reporting on some very interesting research from the USA. He points out that many, if not most, newspapers could be more profitable if they closed their websites and just focused on print instead. I don’t think the mistake was going digital, unless any newspaper had obsolescence…

  • Tis but a flesh wound

    Much has been written in the last week or two about the death of newspapers. The announcement that the Independent will cease its print edition has prompted this hand-wringing and outpouring. The Independent’s hobbyist owner, Evgeny Lebedev, has offered up his own wisdom about the situation. In an interview with the Guardian he claims his…

  • Fearlessly speaking common sense

    I have often made the observation that for the business of media to work well commercially, there has to be a link between popular success and commercial reward. One of the great frustrations of the internet has been that this is, largely, no longer true: even staggeringly popular sites like MailOnline (117m monthly unique users)…

  • The French fancy making life hard for Google, but are they kidding themselves?

    After the revelation that withdrawing from Google News seems to do little (if any) damage to publishers, Eric Schmidt has been in France trying to persuade the President not to allow news publishers to charge Google for including their content on Google News. Google says such a move would “threaten the very existence” of Google.…

  • Saying no to Google News: common sense or suicide?

    Brazilian newspapers have, en masse, withdrawn their content from Google News. The response, not least from Google itself, is the usual mix of unhelpful and self-interested grandstanding. Google’s comparison of themselves to a cab driver bringing customers to a restaurant is particularly absurd, since most restaurants want customers who can pay, and aren’t interested in…