NEWSPAPERS seem to be getting terribly excited about their own radio companies. You can listen to an interview with Tony Blair in a podcast on The Sun’s website — the Prime Minister comes with every newspaper relaunch — and laugh, perhaps, to Ricky Gervais courtesy of The Guardian.

It is all achingly trendy, and some people will want to listen to their newspaper, too. However in a world where other media groups — broadcasters and film studios are desperate to generate revenues, or at least protect income through online activity — the great newspaper internet giveaway seems odd. Both Blair and Gervais come for free.

Apart from the Financial Times, UK newspapers barely charge for the bulk of their online content. If I did not have to go to work on the Tube every morning, it would make more sense to stop buying newspapers altogether and read the best bits online. It is hardly an incentive to boost circulation for the print product.

Meanwhile, the costs of the familiar print are drifting up, particularly at the top end of the market, helping to push readers towards the free stuff online (or even to the BBC). After a recent round of increases, to help to offset weak circulation and rising paper costs, cover prices are up at all the quality dailies by up to 20 per cent compared with a year ago.

Paying a few pence a day for all that a newspaper can offer does not sound like a lot, but with a Sunday thrown in, the loyal reader who buys every day can now pay more than £300 a year. That is more than a typical annual mobile bill, and about as much a home pays for electricity, although the comparison is rarely made.

The prevailing view is that charging now would be a mistake, and whatever one thinks of majority opinions, it makes a lot of sense too. Traffic and advertising revenues are exploding; introducing a charge acts as a cap on demand. Think about it like this, and it makes sense to let the market mature before making consumers pay.

A glance at the Financial Times’s figures seem to support that contention. Over the past 12 months, the number of paying subscribers to FT.com has increased 11 per cent to 83,500. Traffic has also risen to about 4.1 million unique users a month, up from 3.9 million in January last year.

That, though, is still a modest advance compared with elsewhere. According to figures supplied by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, The Times was visited in November by 6.9 million unique users, up 80 per cent year on year. The Guardian was visited by 12.1 million different users, up 23 per cent on the year. This kind of growth suggests that overall readership is going up too.

Online advertising, meanwhile, is growing by an estimated 26 per cent, and some publishers are talking about growth of about 30 per cent. If the print market feels gloomy, then online — with its ITV-style ad-funded business model — shows no signs of stopping. Hardly the time to start alienating the reader then.

Yet, it is hard to escape a sense of unease. Free, of course, remains a compelling price point, and difficult to wean consumers away from. If online advertising races ahead to the point where it overtakes print then it will not matter.

There is, though, still a long way to go: at Associated Newspapers, home of the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard, the internet accounted for only 3 per cent of revenues last year. Commuting, too, is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future, so it seems a bit soon to start assuming that print will collapse. Despite what is happening in some parts of the US, circulation in Britain is holding up much better because competition between newspapers keeps quality high.

Internet freesheets seem to be the right way to go today, but at some point there is going to a reckoning. That, though, is likely to be some way off, given that only a third of all homes have broadband connections. Ultimately making consumers pay to bolster revenue will become a requirement, but that problem can be dealt with at the time.

• Sky One, home to the exploding Brainiac, was once charitably described by the boss of another broadcaster as the “ITV1 of multi-channel television” because its share of viewing was declining as competition increased. This week, Dawn Airey, who is ultimately responsible for all the broadcaster’s entertainment channels, conceded that she “wouldn’t pretend that ratings don’t matter” before adding “thank God they are not the only measure of success”. The channel may help to sell entertainment subscriptions, but Richard Woolfe, coming in from Living TV to head up Sky One, has plenty to do.

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