Although Rupert Murdoch is hardly known for cracking a smile – or even an errant smirk – only a fraction of his scowl results from News Corp’s phone-hacking problems. Most of that grimace surely reflects the state of news publishing, which finds itself caught in the same wave that struck the music industry: a massive drop in revenue and an unprecedented dilution of the audience. But music must have felt like an oil tycoon watching a ruptured pipeline spew away its profi ts. Media gave it away for free – and came up short.

News Corp decided to take action and in 2010 put the Times Of London (The Times) website behind a subscription service. It wasn’t the first to implement a so-called ‘paywall’. The Wall Street Journal has limited content for nonsubscribers since 1997, followed a year later with the first of many New York Times (NYT) paywall experiments. The Times’ decision drew a lot of ire, mainly because it chose a ‘hard’ wall – nobody on the outside gets a sniff, other than spying the headlines. NYT’s latest implementation favours the ‘metered’ model: visitors get x-number of free article views a month, then they have to cough up. Hoping to entice potential new subscribers, some sites don’t penalise links from social media sources.

A paywall history