Recent suggestions that newspaper websites, such as News Group Newspapers' titles, should introduce pay walls are 'a defeatist counsel', the founder of the Sunday Herald said yesterday.

Speaking at the microblogging and journalism event, Media140, Pat Kane, who left the Sunday Herald in 2001 to write 'The Play Ethic', said that newspapers and other news organisations would be able to monetise highly, differentiated or 'scarce' content, but should not look to pay walls alone to make money.

News organisations need to consider 'What's scarce in journalism? What's the scarcity that you can enclose and charge money for?', said Kane.

"The authority of traditional news organisations can be value added, but they'll have to think quite carefully about how they monetise that moment."

Kane said he could see a future for print editions as 'a beautiful object in wood pulp and ink' for weekends, alongside 'pulsing news' website from Monday to Friday.

It is not yet known 'to what extent the Darwinian acid that new media is throwing onto organisations might transform them', he added.

Platforms, such as Twitter, make news ubiquitous and challenges the journalists' ideas of what is scarce, he said. But they can also be used to drive consumers through the general to specialised, paid-for content, he said.

Social media has allowed news consumers to define their own sources, but can also bring significant benefits to journalists and news organisations, Kane added [as explained on the Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog].

Current pressures on the industry are not 'a negative challenge' for journalism, but 'an incredibly enterprising thing', he said.

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