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This is awesome and I'd like to see people move toward paperless Metro papers for the subway within the next two years. I thought the free newspaper war was bad in New York, but being in London, I see 5 daily free newspapers compete to give away papers on a daily basis. Its an outrageous waste of paper. Moreover - 90% of my Saturday paper doesn't apply to me - I think people need to start targeting News Media companies to promote digital format papers and stop creating such an awful amount of waste on a daily basis and perhaps even offering i-Phones with subscriptions to their papers. Its so hard for big cities like New York and London to try improve their Greed credentials when on a daily basis thousands of tons of newspaper are barely glanced at and then discarded.

http://www.grapethinking.com/

The reason newspapers continue to do print editions is that what keeps them in business is the advertising, and online readers mostly don't read (or sometimes even get to see) those ads.

If you want local newspapers to go online only -- and since I mostly read the news online, I'm not against it -- someone needs to develop a business model that doesn't depend on localized small-biz advertising and also doesn't depend on paid subscriptions (which most online readers refuse to pay).

Alternatively, we could go with local news coverage that's all volunteer blogger work... it's a real issue that some clever entrepreneur genuinely should tackle.

New York Times on line free. Why do you think that is?

Papers do it to please readers and to woo online advertising, which they keep hoping will be the answer. Problem is, their online editions aren't the moneymakers. The print editions substantially support the enterprise.

I'm not saying major newspapers aren't online for free -- the regional ones virtually all are -- but that providing free online news is not the business model that allows them to stay afloat. Note that the NYTimes started charging extra for many of its features, and most regional papers charge for archived articles older than a certain date.

The Washington Post already has the entire print edition online for free, plus additional online-only features. Why would anyone want to pay to navigate a tiny version of the paper?