A couple of days ago I teased you by saying the post I had intended to write was set aside for one about Clive Sinclair. I discovered the Sinclair story while taking a short break from work to read the news. Online of course.
Ironically, in doing so, I proved the very piece of research I'd been intending to report on. So here's the delayed post.
According to the American Pew Research Centre the Internet has taken over from print as the key provider of news. We all knew it was going to happen, but it seems the tipping point has been reached.
The research suggests that 92 percent of Americans use multiple platforms to get to news every day, and while these platforms include old tech like TV, radio and paper, 59 percent say they use a combination of online and offline sources in a typical day. The internet has become the third most popular news platform after local TV news and national TV news. Newspapers aren't in the top three.
Loyalty seems to be disappearing too, with 65 percent saying they don't have a single favourite web site for news. Just 21 percent say they routinely rely on one source for news and information.
Now, this is American research, and not immediately transferable to a UK landscape. But it comes at an interesting time.
The BBC's current cost-cutting proposals include shutting down chunks of its web site (there is a link to the strategy review documents here). I heard BBC Director General Mark Thompson say that part of the reason for this action was not to get in the way of commercial services.
There are also suggestions that newspapers might start to charge for online content, and Rupert Murdoch's much reported hopes of charging have been supported by ideas from Google allowing more than five accesses a day to cause a charging system to kick in. There is some detail on that in a Google blog post here.
There is a lot more detail on the Pew research in its press release, which you'll find here.
With newspapers loosing money to free internet usage and that usage now starting to dominate, is the era of a mostly free internet coming to an end?