According to Rupert Murdoch, The Times and other newspapers in the News International stable will begin charging for access to their online portals next year. Murdoch says that he expects other publishers to follow suit. The New York Times is contemplating a similar move. But is it, as Switzerland’s Tages Anzeiger speculates, tantamount to suicide?

Murdoch seems to be saying that newspapers simply will not make money online with free content. Like nearly all the major news organizations, News International has made big losses this year. The Guardian’s management group, too, is looking at closing the Observer newspaper, the world’s first Sunday newspaper, in order to safeguard the Guardian, which has pumped a lot of money into its online venture. Part of the newspapers’ frustration also comes from their content being widely read and often quoted without payment, so they feel that charging is only a matter of justice.

The problem is whether charging is good business. Previously governments have been able to intervene to ensure some kind of rules for newspapers to compete fairly, but that’s just not going to happen on the Internet, so the only thing that matters is how many people are going to pay. Personally, I don’t see where the numbers will come from. The attraction of reading online is immediate choice. Given the choice of restricting yourself to a single paper, paying out subscriptions to lots of them, or finding free content and analysis from among the many news channels, blogs and other feeds, I think it’s not hard to see where most people will go.

Loss of influence, not just readers, is also a problem. One link here was to a Times Online report about the Guardian. Next year, like many others, I won’t be linking to The Times, not out of spite but out of consideration to readers. Paid-content publications will lose visibility online. Or people will lift lots of content and repeat it — which certainly is not the model these newspapers want.

There isn’t an easy solution to the online dilemma for newspapers, and the period of experimentation can’t last forever. The best chance for papers is to understand and leverage the Internet, and stay in the game as long as possible offering free content and services, forging links, and adding incentives, content and services for paying subscribers. In fact, that’s probably the only chance.

Twitter’s main audience is adults rather than teens - that’s been known for a while, and figures from Nielsen now confirm this. What I find interesting about this is not that Twitter should be doing more to attract teens, as some people seem to suggest, but rather that is shows what Twitter is good at. Twitter’s service has been quite a blank canvas in many ways, with people using it however they want, and a huge number of third party apps tweaking and adding features such as groups and search, to name just a couple. So to show a large adult following confirms that a very large number of people - particularly in the US and the UK - find it useful.

So why adults, mainly? A good blog post from Ben Parr at Mashable discusses some reasons behind this, and I think puts the main reasons well (and has lots of good comments). To summarise and add a little of my own point of view, it’s not primarily a venue for chatting with friends and sharing pictures, music and videos. It’s more of a broadcasting platform where celebrities, news organisations and companies try to entertain and update an audience. Like a very big, lightweight, multiple RSS service. Twitter is also very much an open community, and young people tend more to stay within communities they know. It’s also a great platform for sharing and developing knowledge rather than getting a quick overview from answers.com, wikipedia and so on. So, to put it in a nutshell, most teenagers get what they want elsewhere, and more easily.

Which, given Twitter’s overall popularity, is hardly a problem. The age profile is actually an advantage for Twitter, I think. One of MySpace’s problems is that a younger audience gets older fast, and their habits change. Having an audience mostly in middle adulthood is perfect for customer retention and the service’s long-term stability. Additionally, the fact that a lot of people use the service professionally means there are opportunities for paid premium content and services.

I think what surprises many people about Twittter’s age profile is that it’s pretty new. Young people tend to be early adopters, and are well understood by developers of social media applications, who are often also young. But actually, despite its youth, Twitter is now well established, in its maturity rather than early adoption phase. Who uses a mature product depends on who needs it. In this case, the wider community. Granted, it still hasn’t settled on a long-term business model, and it’s a relatively new entrant to a relatively new set of social technologies, but it should be taken seriously, and recognized for what it is - which is now much clearer.