Pound-sign of The Times.

Well, it was no secret that it was going to happen but now it's here.

To which I say only this:

Go fuck yourselves sideways with a typewriter. I like The Times and I enjoy some of the writing, and I'm not totally averse to paying for some things on the internet including. I pay for apps etc. I download if they're keepers (okay, I admit I never paid a cent towards WinZip, but did anyone?) and I've dabbled in music and movies from iTunes (but still prefer DVDs and CDs usually). And I might be willing to pay for specialist news, especially if it was a professional journal and I could maybe put the subscriptions on my tax return. But The Times ain't specialist news, so if you think I'm even registering, much less forking out more than $3 a week for news that is as written just as well elsewhere and is readily available for nothing but the price of putting up with some ads then you are sorely fucking mistaken. What I will be doing is removing The Times content from RSS etc, because apart from archived articles from the old site there's fuck all point anymore, and unless I'm virtually alone in doing so I doubt your advertisers will want to pay the same rates as they have been for very much longer.

I realise the MSM are struggling to make ends meet and that they're hoping the interwebs will come to the rescue but I really doubt this is the answer. Rupert Murdoch might think that people will pay for quality news reporting but the reality is that almost all will take half decent free news reporting any day of the week and twice on Sundays, and as long as one half decent free news source exists they'll get the lion's share of the traffic and the advertising revenue. So bye-bye Times. I'll miss you a little, but not remotely as much as you think.