Magazines!… grow some balls and charge for your iPhone and Blackberry apps. I hear so much whining about ‘oh the BBC is stealing all my eyeballs‘ or ‘boo-hoo the advertising revenues are down‘, well here is your chance to make some subscription revenue and you are squandering it!

iPhone 3.0 can handle subscriptions….  nice ongoing subscription revenue. Even $1 a month would help. I read the telegraph every day on iPhone and I would gladly pay that, and people will gladly pay as long as that becomes the norm. But they won’ t pay if people like Business week are pulling their pants down and destroying the model early.

Business week bringing out a free iPhone app is the WRONG approach. You don’t give away business week for free at the newsstands do you? I hear alot of back pedaling by publishers lead my Murdoch who is now trying to charge for on-line content when it was free before. This is the right idea, but its like closing the gate (10 years) after the horse has bolted.

Now we have a new horse and are thinking of putting him in a pen with no gate again!… why?.  Magazines have a price, and also advertising revenues. Why change the business model just because the medium changes? Sure you don’t have printing costs, but you still have to pay journalists, who are being laid off faster than something very fast that I can’t think of right now.. And it doesn’t seem bad now, but believe me, we don’t want to wake up in 10 years to find out that we live in a world where journalists have been replaced by bedroom bloggers and Twitter!

So like I said – grow some balls, and charge for your valuable content (unless you think it isn’t valuable) AND get advertising revenue too – just like you do for the actual magazine. You never know you might actually make some money!… and as a bonus, you could save journalism too!