But the blog network is still out there even in this more evolved industry, and there are still many unsavory things to watch out for. These tips are also relevant if you’re applying for work at regular blogs outside of a network. Here’s my original article:

Many writers have a hard time making ends meet. That’s why when I hear about blog networks treating writers badly, it gets me riled up. Getting work is hard enough, and once you’ve sunk hours of your time into a network that screws you over, you can’t get it back.

When you lose time on a pursuit that you believe is going to return on the investment, only to find yourself back where you started due to the moral bankruptcy or general ineptitude of your client, it can put you in panic mode trying to put dinner on the table and pay the rent.

That said, there are some excellent blog networks out there who can provide you with a great experience, cash, and exposure – and you won’t have to deal with the technical aspect of blogging.

At the very start of my career, I had some dodgy experiences with networks myself. Here are five warning signs, based on my own experience, to watch out for.

1. They want you to do all the work for a revenue share.

There are precious few revenue share opportunities that will work out well for you as a writer. Revenue share is a model that generally only works when you’re going into partnership with someone to build something from the ground up.

But when a blog network is going to load up WordPress on a few servers, give you an account and say “go!” and expect to split the revenue share in their favor, something’s wrong. Get paid per post. If they can’t offer this, it means they don’t have anything to offer you and you’d be better off starting your own blog and building it from the ground up.

2. Google turns up more negative reviews from ex-writers than positive ones.

Blindingly obvious, you might say, but I know of so many writers who could’ve saved themselves the time and trouble, had they bothered to dig deeper than the first page of search results. It’s better to take the word of multiple fellow writers than decide to just take the chance.

3. The blog network’s age does not scale with the blog network’s size.

If you see a a blog network that has only been around for a few months or a year, yet has hundreds of blogs, it’s a definite sign to steer clear and stay clear. It means they’ve set out to start as many blogs as possible, set them up with poorly paid writers who keep them updated with fresh content, while they sit back and watch the money roll in from the sheer amount of sites.

They’ve probably got unrealistic expectations, but many ‘entrepreneurs’ do get this idea and since they’re just trying to pump out quantity over quality, they’ll ultimately fail. They also don’t care about you, the blog itself, and they won’t take any time communicating with you about any concerns you have once they’ve got you in. Usually, if you do happen to make any money in amounts worth being paid out ($20 or more), they’ll find a way to keep it.

4. What dominates the screen: content, or ads?

Have a quick look at a few of their blogs and see whether the design emphasizes the ads or the content. This is how most blog networks start–some individual lacking a certain level of integrity is sitting around telling a friend:

“We’ll throw up some WordPress blogs with ad-laden themes and chuck a few revenue-share paid writers in – who might make us some money, but if they don’t we won’t lose a cent!”

Ads are fine and to be expected. But if the ads are the focus of the site, with the content just filler for Google spiders, it’s a good sign you won’t be treated well.

5. High blogger turnover.

If the site you’re interested in applying to write for has a long list of former bloggers, it’s a good indicator that you’re not going to want to stay around for long either.

It’s easy to find out if this is a problem–just dig through six month’s worth of posts and see how many times the author changes. If it’s a multi-author blog, you’ll have to take a closer look to see what is going on.

With these five warning signs in mind, you should be able to avoid a dodgy deal when you’re looking for work online. Good luck finding the right blog for you! There are as many good ones out there as bad ones. 451 Press still stinks. Others, like Weblogs Inc, are reportedly pretty good.

I’m not a web developer, and some of my plans are quite advanced beyond what I’m capable of accomplishing alone. This necessitates starting off simple, using my limited knowledge of CSS and PHP to hack together something that does a few of the things I want on top of WordPress (which, despite the odd ideological difference of opinion with the people that create WordPress, I think is an absolutely fantastic bit of software). If the project makes me money at some point in the future, I can hire a developer to make the rest of the plan a reality.

The Dilemma

The question for me now is: where do I stop trying to hack something together that falls in line with my plan and begin the launch-and-iterate phase?

You see, I’ve been on both extremes of the spectrum before–meticulous planner, impulsive launcher. To be honest, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either approach, really. I know many people will disagree with that sentiment. But if you’re the kind of person who needs something to be really finished before you show the world, so be it (as long as it gets out there at some point). And if you don’t care whether the world sees your project half-naked, then who cares? It’ll work out in the end–as long as you’ve created something that’s useful in some way even in its incomplete state.

This time, however, is different. It’s the first time I’ve tried my hand at a fairly complicated web project while employed. In the past when I’ve decided to do something like this, I was self-employed and could devote business hours not consumed by client work to these things.

With limited time (I’m certainly not willing to cut corners and spend my employer’s time on my personal projects) I have less to devote to the project, and less time to teach myself everything required to make the project work from a technical point of view, which is the approach I used as a self-employed bootstrapper.

The Feasibility Test

So, I came up with a very simple test to determine if new ideas are viable for me to work on. Here’s what you do:

• Determine how much of your plan is possible for you to create alone with your existing knowledge.
• Determine how much of your plan requires the help of others, be they artists, developers, marketers–wherever your weaknesses are.
• Figure out the absolute earliest point in development that you could start to make some income from the project.

Test Result A: If you can somehow make money from your project before the complete plan is implemented, and it’s possible to reach that point with your technical abilities, you know what Version 1.0 of your project will look like. Your project is good to go–build that basic first version, put it up on the web, earn some income, and hire the help you need to get to Version 2.0.

Test Result B: If you can’t make any money without the assistance of experts, you have a few less desirable options. You can go out of pocket and hire help (it’ll be good and fast—relative to the time it’d take you—if you hire right, but it won’t be cheap). You can learn the skills and do it yourself–something that’s totally possible but it’s certainly not fast and will not be cheap in terms of time lost. Or you can go back to the drawing board and come up with a new project or retool your existing project so that it can bring in some sort of income with the tools you have at hand.

Luckily, I think I’ve found that point where I’m able to monetize my project without depending on others. I don’t know how much it’ll make, but hopefully I’ll have enough to cover hosting expenses and hire some help after six months.

When it comes to copywriting and content generation, marketing and running a small business, I’m good to go–but I know my weaknesses and think them through before starting a project. What’s stopping you from starting the project you’ve been dreaming about?

Unfortunately, when the vast majority of people start a business, that’s what they’re thinking about–the money and the fancy business parties with canapes. It’s worth noting that most businesses also fail within their first year of operation.

From a purely economical stance, being in business is about having something of value to give people–valuable enough they’ll exchange currency with you, that precious resource that, in society as we have built it, gives us access to food, clothing and shelter.

You need to help people in order to be economically viable. That’s a given, and a basic business principle.

But what about your motives?

Maybe you’ve found a way to market your skills in a way that shows people why they need you. But do you feel a personal commitment to make sure that your customer is really helped by your services? Or are you just trying to get people in the door so you can get paid and go home?

I believe it’s important to truly, genuinely care about helping your clients–and your supporters, friends and family, for that matter. The success of your business depends on it.

You don’t do a good job unless you’re invested in getting results.

Your level of enthusiasm and emotional attachment to the outcome of your work is so important. The accountant who doesn’t care doesn’t dig deep enough to find every extra dollar they can get their client through tax deductions. The writer who doesn’t care doesn’t have any emotion into their work, which comes out limp and lifeless on the page.

You can’t build relationships that last unless you’re invested in getting results.

When you can show your clients that you are passionate about your work and doing a good job of it for their sake, it’s easy to make lifelong relationships that benefit you financially and in more meaningful ways. But when you’re insincere or you do the job half-assed, it really shows–and those clients won’t come back. It doesn’t take a lot from you to care about doing a good job, but you’ll see the difference even decades down the track.

My freelance writing business was about providing copy that really worked for clients so they could succeed, whether it was sales copy, realistic ghostwriting or interesting and informative articles. Towards the end of 2008 I joined Envato because the company is all about helping people learn and earn–and the focus internally really is on helping people more than it’s about helping our bank accounts.

When I show people how they can get rid of their dull jobs or the businesses they built but came to hate and replace that with the work of their dreams, I do it because I love showing people they really do have the ability to make that happen.

I believe that a focus on helping people is far more important to your business success than a focus on the money. That approach hasn’t failed me so far–what’s yours?

Fear that you’ll lose your day job before you’ve established a sustainable income.

Fear that you’ll never find clients.

Fear that your work won’t be good enough.

Fear that you’ll lose it all.

Fear of what you can’t control.

You’re concerned about right now and what’s just around the corner. That’s fair enough. People have to eat, and they have families to support. But maybe you don’t see what’s even scarier.

The prospect of working in a job you hate, until you die or retire to a pension that allows you to scrape by.

The prospect of missing out on the opportunity to own what you create.

The prospect of missing out on a chance to change the world.

I understand why people are scared. It was fear that forced me to put together a profitable business much more quickly than I thought was possible.

Fear that I’d end up another deadbeat teenage dad living off the government and a supermarket checkout job because I couldn’t finish my degree.

Fear that I’d never get to accomplish the things I’d spent my childhood dreaming about.

Fear that I would fail the family I found myself having to provide for at the age of 17.

I used fear to fuel myself, and it worked. Maybe you’re scared of making big changes. But maybe you should look at what’s even scarier when it comes to the legacy you leave behind at the end of your life–and use that fear to help you succeed.

1. Working Too Much

You can make pretty good money as a freelancer if you make the right plans and execute those plans correctly. But when you get a taste of that success, it’s easy to start telling yourself, “If I only worked a couple more hours each night, I could be making another two grand a month!”. While you might fatten your wallet temporarily, it’s a good way to burn yourself right out of the game.

2. Allowing Scope Creep

Especially when you’re starting out, it’s easy to make exceptions to do “just that one extra thing” for a client for free. You feel like annoying the client by refusing to do a bit of extra work within the original quote could mean less work in the future, and you can’t afford the loss of income.

Truth is it’s important to hold your ground from the get-go so that scope creep doesn’t haunt you for the rest of your career. Good clients will respect you for it, and those who don’t will inevitably lose you more money than they make you. When clients want more work done, give them a bill for it.

3. Charging Too Little

Most freelancers are afraid to increase their rates, or even set them at a decent price point to begin with, out of fear of losing or not attracting clients.

There was a time when I was suffering from mistake number one–working too much–and I wanted to fix it. So I increased my rates. Substantially. After that, I had even more work. I’m not the only one to report this–it’s fairly common to experience higher demand when you increase your price. It’s a matter of creating the perception that you have the expertise to do the job well.

If your rates are low, hike them up!

4. Failing to Market

Referral business is the number one source of business for most freelancers. How often do you encourage your clients to refer people to you, or give them an incentive to do so? How often do you follow up with clients who you haven’t worked with in a while?

A freelancer should also be consistently looking for new business through job boards and networking. Cold calling and direct marketing can work, too. But when you’re making enough to pay all the bills, how much time do you really spend marketing your business?

5. Not Screening Clients Thoroughly

Always check your new clients out, whether they were referred to you by a fellow freelancer with a full plate or you’re applying for some work on a job board.

I can think of a few times when I dealt with clients from hell and suffered consequences that could’ve been avoided if I’d asked the referring friend more questions or Googled the client a bit. It’s not particularly hard to check them out, but it could potentially save you a world of trouble.

6. Burning Bridges

When you realize your screening process failed and you agreed to work for a dud, you’re going to want to get out. Be careful how you do it.

Even if they are bad clients, they might be great networkers and friends with all the people in who might hire you in your niche. Don’t tell them what horrible clients they’ve been and how you’re going to tell all your friends not to work with them. Wrap the project up cleanly, professionally and politely, and move on. Unless their problem is non-payment, complete anything outstanding. You don’t want them to tarnish your reputation just because you couldn’t handle the nuisance long enough to finalize commitments.

7. Depending On Too Few Clients

Freelancers get asked all the time: isn’t freelancing far less stable than just getting a real job?

And I usually respond that it’s much more stable because your sole employer can fire you and put you in a real pickle, but if one out of many clients drops you, you’re only slightly worse off, and it’s easier to make up that smaller portion of income, too.

But if you fail to distribute your eggs amongst enough baskets, Mr Condescending Employee is right–you’ll have serious trouble when one of your top two or three clients fires you.

8. Failing to Use a Contract

It might be a nuisance to get a basic contract either drawn up by or reviewed by your lawyer, but it’s an investment you can make once and protect yourself with repeatedly. There are so many ways a client can screw you if you don’t have a contract. It also means there are no uncertainties about the things left unsaid in negotiations.

Do you know how the transfer of intellectual property occurs? Do you prefer to license rather than transfer the copyright? These are just two examples of the many variables you can control with a contract that would otherwise be up to the law.

9. Not Saving Enough for Tough Periods

If you’re not well established as a freelancer, you might be forced to make mistake 7: depending on too few clients. You need to have the savings to make ends meet should one of the clients who pay your bills have to let you go. Don’t hope for the best–get the savings in place before you quit your job, or if you’re forced out of your job for whatever reason, make it top priority with your first client payments.

10. Forgetting Why You Freelance

And the worst mistake a freelancer can make: forgetting why they became a freelancer in the first place. This is when you start to make the compromises that made you hate your old job in the first place–like the first nine points in this piece.

What Are Your Biggest Freelancer Mistakes?

If you’ve made freelancer mistakes I haven’t listed here, tell us about in the comments–and perhaps save another freelancer from doing it themselves.

WordPress/Linux/Other Open Source App Couldn’t Exist Without the GPL

If you’ve been on Twitter, you’ve probably heard this statement several times over today. It’s an absurd and stupid thing to say. The GPL is a license, nothing more and nothing less. The GPL-licensed, open source applications that thrive and succeed don’t do so because of their choice in license. They succeed because the developers believe in free collaboration and community contribution and all that good stuff.

The GPL is just one of many open source licenses, and it merely makes an attempt to give a standard legal license to those who want to conduct a project in a way informed by open source principles. It’s a tool that helps these developers give away certain exclusive rights without requiring a lawyer to draw up a new license every time they start a new project.

The GPL is not the cause for any project succeeding. The people behind the project are.

The Platform Versus the Application

The question of whether themes are derivative or original creations is at the heart of this debate. If they are derivatives, they’re legally required to adopt the GPL license. If they’re original creations, they are not.

As I said, I’m not and won’t pretend to be a lawyer–but to me it’s common sense that a derivative would be taking WordPress and building another CMS based on its code. On the other hand a theme, which is your own unique design and customer experience and way of presenting information, is an original creation. The ease with which you can convert a theme from WordPress to HTML and vice versa should demonstrate that no theme really requires WordPress; they just work with WordPress.

When you really look at it, all WordPress does–for the complicated and feature-rich system it is–is either provide a layer of interaction between human and rendered HTML that automates some tasks and simply provides a human-friendly interface for other tasks. WordPress is incredibly useful and I’m not trivializing it (I love it), but to say that themes are derivatives of WordPress is as absurd as claiming themes are derivatives of CSS and HTML.

The GPL hasn’t been tested in court in this sense, but the best analogy is that theme is to WordPress as application is to operating system. If anyone said Photoshop was a derivative of any of the operating systems it runs on they’d be laughed at–and it would never hold up in court. The developers of commercial applications for Linux-based operating systems (Linux is also an open source licensed product, if you didn’t know) are happily conducting business without any threat of litigation. Themes are simply applications on the WordPress operating system.

Why It Shouldn’t Matter Anyway

Whether Mullenweg can or cannot enforce this is beside the point. It’s not a business savvy decision. For the sake of his business and product, he shouldn’t be doing this.

There’s the small issue of PR. While all the WordPress fanboys and free software fanatics are clamoring behind Mullenweg, he looks silly for picking petty fights to everybody else. There’s the fact that he’s essentially slandered Pearson with some of his statements and the mobilization of aforementioned fanboys certainly hasn’t helped, and is now open to cop a lawsuit himself.

But I’m not talking about either of those things.

If you develop a platform and you have any respectable business acumen, you’re not going to criminalize your evangelists. Someone who could make smart business decisions would actively encourage a free market around the product. GPL, proprietary, any of the licenses in between–it doesn’t matter, you encourage it. You can keep your own product licensed as GPL and encourage theme developers to go that way, but it’s only going to help your product to encourage a free market including all license types around the product.

Matt Mullenweg has the option to create a thriving, diverse free market around WordPress. An entire micro-economy. When deciding on a content management system, consumers would choose WordPress because of the amazing diversity of themes they can acquire. Developers would remain loyal to the system because they know they can engage in the commercial agreement with customers that suits them best.

WordPress is in a good position now–it’s popular, developers love it, and there are plenty of themes available for money and for free (though they’re not usually very good free themes). By beginning a campaign against the platform’s most enthusiastic evangelists it could very well kill itself.

I hope that Mullenweg does sue somebody and the courts determine that themes are not required to be distributed under the GPL. Ironically, I hope for this because I like using WordPress and want it to thrive so I can continue using it.

Lessons for Your Business

• Success is about the people you get involved. Not the constitution of your company or the legal structure you choose to operate under; they’re just tools.
• Don’t try to control or assassinate your evangelists.
• If there’s a market around your product, encourage it–it’ll only make your company its product more indispensable.

Disclaimer: I work for Envato. We run ThemeForest, which sells premium themes, so it’s important for me to note that I am not representing the views of Envato (who in fact enforces a policy requiring themes to be GPL licensed), and I’m my work there is not involved with ThemeForest so I have no vested interest in this myself. These are my thoughts, and mine alone.

Update: Envato colleague Fred Wu has done one of his classic one-page sites at Fuck GPL — love it!

But we can certainly learn some marketing lessons from Chinese Democracy and Guns N’ Roses: from both the mistakes they’ve made and the things they’ve done well.

This is an article I published in 2008 before Chinese Democracy came out. I think it makes points about product marketing that are still applicable today, so I’ve published it on the new JoelFalconer.com.

First lesson:

Building Anticipation Works

One thing that Chinese Democracy has achieved is building anticipation. Instead of waiting until the album was nearly finished to announce that it was coming soon, the band strategically made announcements when the album was in early development, when new band members were found, and made good use of live shows to preview a select few songs.

If the band waited until they were ready to release the album before making any announcements, Guns N’ Roses would never have managed to stay in the public eye despite having no releases since the early 90s (or mid-90s, if you really must count The Spaghetti Incident).

Leaking Material Helps Build Anticipation

There was probably no tool more effective at building this anticipation than the leaks that have periodically made their way onto the Internet. I am almost positive that these were strategic and authorized by Axl Rose himself, but the appeal of a leak is, in part, its rogue nature. If they were unintentional, they still did more to help the band than hurt it.

It also sets the tone for the official release of the product, where the band has a chance to blow people away by releasing something with more power and polish than the demos and unmastered tracks that got out. This is all about exceeding expectations—we’ll have to wait and see if they pull this part off, though.

Stringing Your Customers Along Betrays Trust

It is all too easy to go too far with the anticipation-building phase of your campaign. You need to know when to stop and just release the damn thing. By putting off the release so many times, the band actually lost fans, betrayed the trust of interested consumers and damaged their credibility.

Once you start alienating your fanbase, the inevitable happens…

Betraying Trust Deflates Anticipation

All the anticipation you’ve built deflates. People stop checking periodically to see if the album has made it to the store. The customer has wasted so much effort trying to stay informed on the product that they become apathetic, and it takes one hell of a campaign to fix this once the damage has been done.

You can apply these techniques and avoid these mistakes in almost any area of your business, blog, or product’s marketing. For instance, if you have an absolutely killer guide on a popular topic written for your web site, don’t whack it up on the web straight away: build some anticipation first by making mention of it in your posts and telling friends, colleagues and readers about it on your social networks.

This is marketing 101. It’s no secret, and it’s really basic stuff. But rarely is this advice taken on board or executed properly.

Just don’t make the fatal mistake. You have to release something, someday.

Brett Kelly has just released an eBook on using Evernote effectively. I was given the chance to take a look inside it before it went live (my favorite section is on Evernote’s uses for foodies), and it’s full of practical information on making the software work well for you.

Whether you’re coming to Evernote for the first time or you’re a long-time fan like me, the book’s worth a look. Go check it out:

Evernote Essentials

The people we hired are talented, but there’s still a process of imparting knowledge. It’s important to understand that at Envato we generally hire people who are experienced with social media and good at the language to edit sites, rather than people who are experienced with traditional editing and good with social media. Only one of the new editors is like me in that they were editing content for money before coming on board.

The reason I’ve been thinking about editing a lot recently is not because these guys are doing anything less than an amazing job. It’s the act of passing on that part of the job that’s been prompting me to ask myself how I’d go about training someone who had a harder time taking to the role because they haven’t been writing or editing for years.

So when you see something about editing on this site, it’s exactly what I’d tell someone who is learning about the craft itself for the first time, beyond the basics that are too often lacking among members of modern society (I mean, we shouldn’t need editors to tell you what to capitalize and where to put that apostrophe, right?).

These are my thoughts on approaching an edit. There are editors at each extreme–those who will go in hacking and slashing, and those who will make minimal changes after extensive re-reading and consideration. I like to think of my own as approach as one that respects the author and the audience. I give the piece proper consideration and make sure I understand it before I touch it, but after that, any change to improve the way that information is communicated is fair game.

My own editorial process developed when I first started editing in earnest several years ago for a publication aimed at creative artists.

It’s important to realize that “nuts and bolts” editing is just one part of the edit, and that, when looking at the piece as a whole, you’re not really looking at technical inaccuracies. An edit must be informed by knowledge of the piece and the author’s intentions, and each change made to advance the work as a whole–its readability and ability to clearly convey concepts that the author may have had difficulty in articulating without the editor’s assistance.

In a rushed world, editors often have to give less attention to a piece than they’d like and to focus instead on the volume of their output to meet quotas. Any process can be adapted to fit the constraints of the situation if you understand the philosophy. The philosophy behind my process is this: understanding the piece in its context is essential to being able to make informed edits on either the minor details within it or something as big as the structure itself, so that your changes don’t change the intended meaning of the piece. Clarify and bring the meaning out, yes, but your job as editor is not to change it.

My preferred method is a multi-pass approach:

1. Read the piece as a consumer. No pen in hand. Never begin editing any part of the piece before you find out where it’s going.
2. Read it again, this time with a pen or highlighter to make note of things you’d like to come back to later. At this point you should be reading as an editor, though not really editing yet–just bookmarking things to be looked at again.
3. Perform a structural edit. At this stage, you’re focusing on making the piece readable and perfecting its flow. This can mean re-writing sentences, moving paragraphs around, and all sorts of cut-and-pasting. The biggest changes you make all occur in this pass.
4. At this point you should ensure the language of the piece is technically sound. I recommend doing this “nuts and bolts” edit after your structural edits because so much can be accidentally changed while you’re moving entire sentences and paragraphs around.
5. Preview in place. Change the medium. If you’ve been writing in Notepad, put the article in WordPress and preview it so you can see what the work looks like in the medium it will end up in. Often just changing the medium on your final review of the work opens your eyes to a whole bunch of things you didn’t see previously.

It’s a fairly simple process, but it does take a bit of time to complete it. With the amount of content I had on my desk each day from three different sites at any given time, along with a multitude of other duties to perform, I didn’t always get to follow it as written, but it’s a good foundation.

The most important skill an editor needs to develop is not an advanced technical knowledge of the language (although it is important). That skill is being able to identify the mental ‘snags’ in the work. These are the places you are most likely to lose an impatient reader to another tab in their browser.

Which passages trip the reader? I’m sure you know what I’m talking about–when you have to re-read a seemingly fine sentence repeatedly until you comprehend it and move on, or a sentence just ‘feels’ wrong, throwing you out of the natural flow and making it that much harder to get back into reading. While this all sounds somewhat unquantifiable and fluffy, from a business perspective this is the editor’s most important function–ensuring that the copy itself is not causing readers to go elsewhere. Instead, it should be compelling, keeping the reader on the page and sending them to explore other pages of your site or publication.

To pick out bad wording that is technically correct you need to take off the editor’s hat and read the piece in a very passive way. If you’re thinking like an editor and looking for mistakes, you may miss subtle things that you’d only notice if you were only paying attention to the ease with which you can read the piece passively. Note where there are mental snags with a highlighter or some other tool that doesn’t require you to stop for long or break flow. What you’re looking for can be almost imperceptible or it can be a serious fault in the wording, and both extremes deserved to be fixed. There’s no nit-picking in editing. The difference between that great magazine story you can’t put down and something you have to force yourself through is often simply a dedicated editor who removes every obstacle to the process of reading.

This is where the work of real editing lies. If you know how to hire writers, you shouldn’t have to spend much time fixing apostrophes and odd plurals–that’d be like a hospital having a team of surgeons who don’t know how to insert a drip. Your job isn’t to fix a bad piece; it’s to take good work and elevate it to greatness.

How do you approach editing? Whether you simply need to get your blog posts in good shape before publishing them or you edit other people’s content for a living, I’m curious to know.

He sounded like a man who fears being torn between necessity and idealism. Making online journalism pay its way is the necessary bit (and this, of course, might mean charging for content in the end). It would be “crazy to be fundamentalist” about paywalls, Rusbridger suggested, “because none of us knows [whether they will work]“

via Ad-funded Guardian could switch off presses by 2015.