December 5, 13.46pm
A rant, I'm afraid.
On my way home through London in the evening I am offered roughly a dozen opportunities to take a free evening newspaper - London Lite or the Londonpaper, both of which have been launched this year as part of a continued trend towards newsprint being handed out for nothing. (There are two morning titles, Metro and City AM, also).
I turn them all down with an increasing degree of annoyance caused in part by the fact that the army of distributors employed to handle this task is a severe obstacle to the flow of commuters that London's narrow pavements struggle to cope with anyway.
And I turn them down for two main reasons: firstly they are rubbish, full of celebrity/entertainment non-news and secondly they represent a serious threat to the future of quality print journalism, which I believe is an essential component of a healthy democracy.
There is an element of journalistic ego working in here also. I find it difficult to believe that there are media owners out there prepared to "give away" journalism. It undermines the output of the profession throughout.