IF the industry he loves cannot pay for itself it will wither and die. But as The Australian launches its "freemium" website, our Online Editor is confident journalism has an exciting future in the digital age.

On Monday, The Australian website introduces a “freemium” model, providing some breaking news articles free but charging for premium content such as analysis and opinion.

The move follows the paid content successes of the New York Times, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.

A digital-only subscription to The Australian’s website, iPad app and mobile site will be $2.95 a week. As a six-day a week subscriber to The Oz’s print edition already, I receive 12 months free.

In what seems an overly generous exception, readers can access up to five premium-content stories a day via Google, plus one free click-through from Facebook.

Do I read more than five articles on one newspaper website each day? Not often. Would I pay for something I’m used to getting for free? Definitely. Do newspapers have a future in the age of the iPhone and iPad? I’m convinced they do.

Of course there’s competition. Twitter is the most useful journalistic tool since the notepad. Each day I read a bewildering number of digital news sources around the world, from Mashable to Coverjunkie to The Oatmeal.

But at this stage the “wisdom of the crowd” is yet to best the authority, gravitas and intelligence provided by a strong, well-led team of professional reporters.

My newspaper addiction began when I was still in short pants, shivering in Auld Reekie’s pre-dawn winter gloom,  hauling a bag half my own body weight full of papers around Edinburgh’s New Town.

I’m not grumbling. Ink seeped into my blood through my frozen fingers on those frigid mornings, and a love of news and newspapers blossomed before my first shave, never to let me go.

Newspapers were the only game in town then, the only source of printed reports and analysis, and nothing much changed through my teenage and college years.

Gazing back, I vaguely recall a frisson of excitement logging on to thetimes.co.uk for the first time after its launch in 1998.

On its homepage, the website promised that “the World Wide Web is changing forever the way information is delivered the world over”. They weren’t wrong.

By 2008, when I worked alongside dozens of digital journalists at The Times, the website was a behemoth boasting 23 million unique visitors each month, generating more than 100 million page impressions. My section created four of the site’s 10 most read articles ever – lists of movies, including one that generated more than eight million page impressions.

Thanks to the global reach of the web, articles such as “Sex and the Olympic city” (2.2 million reads), “10 bizarre sights on Google Street View” (1.88 million) and “I had sex with my brother but I don’t feel guilty” (1.81 million) must rank among the most read newspaper articles ever.

But how much money did they make my paper? Newspaper websites generate respectable cash from display advertising, and The Times made enough to cover the digital budget and make a tidy profit.

But it was never enough to pay for the hugely expensive news gathering machine that is a well-staffed modern newspaper.

So something had to give. No newspaper is a charity, though Rupert Murdoch, owner of this paper as well as The Australian and The Times, is certainly a more generous benefactor than most.

Murdoch’s support for unprofitable newspapers is fuelled by a lifetime love affair with print (or a desire for influence, depending on who you listen to).

In July 2010 The Times brought down its paywall: putting everything behind lock and key.

In a stroke traffic fell more than 95 per cent. 16 months later, the site claims 110,000 subscribers, paying $3 a week.

Would a similar paying percentage be deemed a success by The Australian?

When the alternative is a world where expertly, expensively produced content is given away free, the answer has to be yes.

Got a question about The Cairns Post? Something to say about this column? Something to share? Contact our Online Editor on crerars@tcp.newsltd.com.au or follow him at twitter.com/simoncrerar

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