The Sun is setting?

So, today the Sun newspaper announced that it is no longer going to provide free content on-line but is retreating behind a pay-wall in what is becoming an increasingly popular strategy for revenue generation. The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Times and Sunday Times, and indeed now The Onion all charge for content either behind a 'hard pay-wall' which allows no content to be read for free, or providing headlines or a few articles per day/week/month for each user. And that is fine, I guess. Each provides quality journalism, while I might not appreciate the editorial bias, based on in-depth research and writing by qualified and intelligent writers.

The Sun on the other hand, you could not pay me to read. Seriously, not only would I not fork out my hard earned cash to read its atavistic, misogynistic bile in print or on-line, but I would not read it if you paid my mortgage for me. Say what you want about the tabloid press but the Sun is a particularly bad example, and after the mobile phone hacking scandal, the fact that Page 3 continues into the 21st century much to the chagrin of many, not to mention historical grumbles regarding the Miners' Strike, Hillsborough &c. I am genuinely surprised anyone still reads the Sun. Its readership has been declining in part due to a lack of quality on-line content, so it hardly seems like charging people is the way forward. Regardless, it is nice for once to talk about newspaper pay-walls without going into the old arguments of the degradation of the internet culture of free open access and so forth and instead take some joy that the Sun's on-line content will be behind a pay-wall because it means I am far less likely to be linked accidentally via twitter etc. to their 'journalism' and that hopefully (as pay-wall's have been less than successful in the past) this move, and their declining readership marks the setting of The Sun in the UK.