Journalistic.co.uk - the UK digital journalism blog

Good piece in The Guardian about paying for newspaper content. The piece starts with revealing that the New York Times now has 270,000 paid subscribers to its Times Select service.

The New York Times’ early success suggests people are prepared to pay on the web and offers another model for newspaper executives round the world to ponder. The paper has said that half the subscribers to TimesSelect had signed up on the back of print subscriptions, while the other half were online-only customers.

The service, which costs $49.95 a year or $7.95 a month, offers exclusive online access to the paper’s columnists and its archives.

What if Google bought Amazon and what if online media was controlled by Google?

Well, check this out. It’s from the future!

Well, it is now a week since UK Online became my broadband provider and so far, so good for this £14.99 2meg connection.

No real problems to speak of when it comes to the quality of the service.

Only downwide is that unlike BT Yahoo, if you are travelling, you can’t use UK Online for sending emails unlike BT Yahoo which allowed sending of emails when a person is away from their home connection.

UK Online says it is to cut down on potential spam going through its network, but it is a bit annoying especially when you spend nearly an hour on the phone trying to get through to someone at UK Online to explain that they don’t offer the facility for sending out email through them when you are on the move.

Of course, this was a nice feature of BT Yahoo, but at £12 a month more expensive than UK Online, it is something you can do without and besides, there are other ways to make sure your emails are sent out when you are on the move.

Well, I finally got round to getting myself a Blackberry and thought I would share this current great offer that T-Mobile is making for the 7290.

Click here to see it.

Of course, this offer can only be found if you run a google search for Backberry, as if you try to find it on the actual T-Mobile site, it is not there!

So for £19.99 plus £5.99 delivery, you get a Blackberry 7290.

You also then get 12 months half price line rental, but of course, it is an 18 month contract you sign up for.

You get 300 minutes to any network for £14.50 (instead of £29).

First 9 months are half price, then 6 months at full price and then the next 3 month half price and also at the end of the contract you can carry on with half price if you want.

Plus, and here’s the cool and very useful bit for all of us who want to check email on the go, for an extra £10 a month you get the always on email service.

T-Mobile says it is unlimited email, subject to fair use with the following terms: “If a customer exceeds 50Mb in a given month, we may request the customer reduce their usage of the service.”

Well, the average email seems to be around 10k or so, so that means, an average of 160 a day.

Not sure if that is a reasonable fair use these days, especially for those of us on lists and also the amount of spam that comes through.

This is the page on instant email charges.

Anyway, thought I would share that as it is a good offer and just wait to see what happens if you exceed the usage as there is no mention of what excess charges are if any.

Well, after two weeks of waiting, UK Online is now my broadband provider.

BT Yahoo! went off at arounf midday and in came UK Online at 5pm.

So far, it’s been connected for about five hours and seems to be just as good as my previous and more expensive BT Yahoo! account.

So for £14.99 a month, as opposed to £26.99, it certainly is a major saving. Just hope that in terms of connection, it is as reliable as BT Yahoo was. Well, only time will tell.