Wow, Napster – there’s a blast from the past! Doesn’t that feel like a lifetime ago?

I’d be very sad to see newspapers go, I’m a lifelong fan of the daily paper and worked in the magazine trade for several years. But things really are looking bleak and unless someone comes up with some ways forward, I fear for the industry – at the moment they all seem paralysed and don’t know which way to turn.

In the meantime – there’s an interesting post on Technoviaabout how Apple may expand the App Store model for software in general for the Mac platform, which maybe factors into this issue.

Now just seven years later, that’s almost the only place I buy my music.

I think an iNews service could work. Plus, it would provide a good platform for organizing all your different news services into one place, based on topic, region, etc. Thanks for thinking positively about the current journalism situation and figuring out solutions rather than declaring the end of newspapers, as many other sources tend to do these days.

1) Registration IS a pain the neck and people hate logging in at all these sites. So it would have to be one, central system. Do it once, like with iTunes, not for each record label. As soon as the conscious mind gets invoked and starts asking questions, you’ll lose the ’sale’.

2) This is actually the reason so many people think the BBC hs to be killed – because in almost any media revenue stream, the BBC’s fee-less presence distorts the market. So the trick has to be to make the pay-for stream so large and compelling, and so economical, that it stands comparison even with the BBC.

3) Again, the system has to be so easy and subconscious that then the process of cut and paste and reporting elsewhere looks like an annoying inconvenience by comparison.

4) I don’t think even the most zealous free speech advocate could seriously object to an author and publisher’s right to charge for their own material!

But no, I don’t think for a minute iNews has a chance in hell. For one thing, the publishers would all insist on outrageous prices (either long term subs or full cover price per day’s access, despite the fact that most of that cost is relating to newsprint and physical distribution.)

Also, they’ll never team up to work together – they’d rather die alone than risk working with a rival.

And finally – the technical investment to get the system working just isn’t practical. Many sites have already tried subs models and got burned and dismantled them, so they’re not going to try it again.

But if they don’t … Are all these sites going to go out of business? We’ll miss them when they do. It’ll take an “Apple of the news work” to push it through in the way that Steve Jobs made it happen for music, but sadly the newspaper industry just doesn’t know HOW to stay alive.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a better idea at the moment. My only suggestion is that the ‘virtual tip jar’ concept could be more prevalent – linked in with a system like PayPal could make micro payments more economic. But NetBeans and many others have been tried before and failed – were they just ahead of their time?