SYDNEY

IF YOU LOG on to The Sydney Morning Herald website, the paper has a sad story of hubris and suicide from The Hamptons on Long Island, New York.

The story is not important. Access to it is.

The Sydney Morning Herald wants you to pay for access.

Click on to The New York Times website and the very same story, is free.

This is happening all the time. Newspapers unable to finance their own stories because enough people are not reading them any more, are republishing stories from around the world; and then trying to charge for it.

So if you see a story in a paper from somewhere far away, and they want to charge you, search for that story somewhere else, and you might get it for free.

Of course, in doing that you will be contributing to the death of the newspaper.

Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?