The chief executive of Johnston Press has called for the BBC to be limited to three online news stories per day per city.
The Telegraph reports today that John Fry has made the call to the BBC Trust as he seeks to increase paid-for digital services.
Johnston Press experimented with paywalls on several of its weekly newspaper titles last year, but quietly dropped them in March this year. It was widely thought at the time that the experiment had been a failure.
According to the Telegraph, Fry has said that he is now waiting until devices such as Ipads become more popular before seeking to bring in further charges for online content.
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He told the paper: “Doing it on the internet is very difficult, because we’ve had 15 years of free.” He added that Johnston Press’ “uniqueness is offering very local news. And no one else has that news. So, if the only way to access it is to pay, some people will pay.”
Johnston Press is the UK’s second biggest regional newspaper publisher.
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