Free newspapers are a nuisance here in the heart of the USA. Renters in my neighborhood ignore them, toss them into the street, or even my yard. They didn’t ask for the paper, don’t want it, and don’t even have an opt-out option. They become and eyesore, and the renter could even be technically fined by the city. The papers have little real news or announcements, mostly just ads that fund the beast that will not die.

I just wish the local enforcement agencies would mandate at least an opt-out option. Free becomes a nuisance when it is undesired. We have spam filters, ad filters, do-not-call lists, do-not-check-my-credit-rating options: why not “do not litter” options?

You know – the real problem with all this is that “nothing is free” – These services come at the cost of our personal information. The model needs to shift whereby the public at large treats their IP as a form of currency – this way, people who give up their Personal Information can appropriately be compensated for the repurpose of their intellectual property.

As an aside, but important to the maturing regulatory field that governs the liability of pii holders, Businesses who require customers to pay for services contractually assume the liability of the potential for compromise of any personal information in their care, custody and control, regardless of whether or not their Service Level Agreements try to say that they are absolved of this liability. This liability shift is happening now and will continue to mature in the coming years.

Hi Mike. As a Danish citizen familiar with some of the aspects you mention in the article, and as a software engineer working with both commercial and “free” (as in “beer”) software, I have a few things to add.

I think “free” can both GO wrong and be DONE wrong. The case about the free newspapers in Denmark (which really started in Sweden) is probably a bit of both.

First of all it is important to remember that “free” for the end-consumers is not necessarily “free” for everyone else. Nothing is truely free except perhaps love and kindness. A free newspaper is extremely expensive to a LOT of people – as I am sure is also true for a lot of other “free” products. Why? Because free newspapers not only caused pain and financial agony for the established “traditional” newspapers. They also introduced very heavy costs to local recycling stations who suddenly had to process tons of old newspapers – as well as the public transportation grid in greater Copenhagen where MANY resources had to spent on cleaning up the tons of “newspaper-litter” created by sloppy readers in the trains and busses. At its peek the “free” newspapers cost the public transportation grid several extra MILLIONS for cleanup and disposal of the approx 730 tons of newspaper-waste (a whopping 80% of the total waste generated by passengers) for an urban area which by comparison is similar to about one fifth of Washington DC (a total of approx 1,1 million people).

The “free” newspapers translated into a heavy extra cost for others – in this case the public transportation company and the municipal recycling stations. And this is just one example – I am sure that “free” really introduces heavy costs for other players in EVERY scenario you can think of. It would be interesting to see some genius (you perhaps?) invent a “total cost of free” (or perhaps “actual cost of free”) calculation. I am not being sarcastic – please consider this a serious proposal.

In your article you also state that: “Everyone just copied each other, rather than trying to offer something different and better.”

That is actually incorrect.

Each free newspaper developed its own identity and some of them spawned a lot of new concepts and ideas for the media industry. They each had a different approach to generating their content and attracting readers. Some of them were delivered to your doorstep as a morning paper. Others were distributed by a horde of “paperboys” on the streets handing out newspapers to everybody who wanted one (at train stations, squares, rows of cars waiting for a green light in the morning traffic, etc). Some newspapers had virtually NO journalists employed – they simply copy-pasted all the telegrams from various news agencies and printed them. Others had real journalists who focused on generating their own stories and interviews, profiling themselves as a more “serious” free newspaper because they SEEKED out the news rather than just copy-pasting them from a news terminal. And some of them created homepages with a lot of 2-way communication with their readers, where readers could contribute to the newspaper contnt by writing and submitting their own articles or creating a blog about various issues (the best blog-posts would then be printed in next days physical paper).

In the end, consumers wanted only one thing: free newspapers with absolutely no regard for the quality of the content. For that reason the obvious winner were the papers who had the smallest staff, cheapest distribution costs and simplest/cheapest homepages. The most innovative papers had to close because the heavy competition could not finance their initiatives. The few remaining papers consolidated them selves, merged, and today only two of them remains – both nearly identical in concept and content: no journalists, only news directly copy-pasted from news agencies, and a lot of ads.

The conclusion? The “newspaper wars” in greater Copenhagen was won by the papers that were most cost-effective, had the smallest staffs, and the cheapest distribution models. The most innovative papers with quality, new services and new concepts died a slow and painful death. But please don’t accuse them of not trying. They certainly did NOT just copy each other. The only common factor was the “price” (free).

Sadly the remaining papers are just a collection of yesterdays news telegrams from various news agencies, mixed with a horde of ads. The net result is a statistical larger number of people in Denmark reading physical papers – but at the expense of quality and innovation. Not for lack of trying, but because in the end the readers simply didn’t care enough about the quality of the content. The long-term effects are hard to predict but a lets assume a worst case scenario: all newspapers 5 years from now are similar to the “winners” of the newspaper-wars. They have a sound business model for “free” (i.e. let others pay for a bunch of the related expenses, produce the cheapest possible product and deliver it using the cheapest possible channels). So, is this “free DONE right” by your definition? Perhaps it is for the investors but certainly not for society as a whole. A democratic society needs critical media with resources to SEEK the news, scrutinize political processes, and analyze the actions of corporations.

Which brings me to the final point: the hidden cost of “free”. In this case the “free” newspapers crippled the established media. Capitalism won – which is fair enough in a world of free economics – but was it the best thing for society? I personally believe that the “free” newspaper have come at a very high cost to society. And in the long run these “free” (as in beer) newspapers are replacing other “free” (as in freedom) media which have a crucial role to play in a democratic society. A role which primitive copy-paste-newspapers can never have.

– Jesper

I agree with the sentiments of the #12. They should have to pay for personal info.