This morning’s Observer column.

If you want to return to the past, it makes sense to understand it, and here we run into some puzzles. Take the notion that, in the good ol’ days of print, customers paid for content.

Shortly before writing that sentence I was handed a copy of the London Evening Standard, which contained lots of ‘content’ but was, er, free. And although this is the most conspicuous example in the UK of printed content being given away, free newspapers have been thriving for decades. The only thing that marks out the Standard from a provincial freesheet is that its content is of a higher class. So even in the newspaper world, lots of content has been free for ages…