In recent weeks I’ve had a seriously hard time convincing paywall advocates of the larger implications of such a move. Why retreat into the old print model? Find new digital business models to replace the flagging print revenue.

To lock content behind paywalls or, worse, keep it offline altogether, merely casts a newspaper’s destiny into the hands of the remaining few who insist on getting their news delivered on dead trees at the end of their driveway. Unfortunately, they won’t be with us much longer. And I doubt any of them would be willing to pay the full cost of ink, paper, fuel and delivery needed to distribute their product of choice.

Now comes The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, at the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture at London College of Communication, to better articulate the critical point that has eluded me. You can read The Guardian’s piece about the speech here.

“It’s not a ‘digital trend’. It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about resisting the people who want to close down free speech.

“If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it then, never mind business models, we could be sleepwalking into oblivion.

And maybe my favorite quote:

“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”

Well said.