Clearly it's desperate days in the newspaper world. Last week the Asian Wall Street Journal (AWSJ) set up a booth offering cut price access to the paper and WSJ.com. This morning at Pacific Coffee there are free International Herald Tribune's and an offer of 2 weeks free delivery, with a stack of IHT's begging to be taken. Walking into the office, the AWSJ stand has morphed in a stack of free copies of today's edition, a pile that has remained static and high for most of the day.

At the same time Ian Lamont discusses his recent op-ed in the best locally produced English-language daily in East Asia* on the potential power of the internet and mobile phones amongst China's citizenry. Ian was paid a freelance fee that works out to about $200. I'm assuming that's US dollars, not HK dollars. With the typical mix of low quality op-ed pieces and cut-and-paste jobs from various syndicates or "big papers" on the SCMP's pages, that sounds like money for jam. There's plenty of good blogs out there (many of which I link to) which give you better and clearer analysis from people on the ground...for free. Note that this isn't having a go at Ian...his piece was the exception that proves the rule.

What's happening to newspapers? They can't even give them away for free.

* _{Incredibly, he's talking about the SCMP. Although what's the competition in that category?}