Can the web save the press from oblivion?

Newspapers have been battered by the internet. But the industry could be about to fight back - with help from websites that aim to be the iTunes of journalism

Last week a group of 17 American news organisations, including the New York Times and Washington Post, served a cease-and-desist legal order against a start-up news platform. The platform, called Brave, was launched in January by the creator of JavaScript, Brendan Eich. The Brave browser had been created in part in response to two recent trends in news delivery: the emergence of mobile platforms such as Apple News and Facebook's Instant Articles, and the growing use of software that allows readers to block advertisements from news content.

Eich's model had ad-blocking software built in - but its new trick was to strip out ads sold with news content and replace them with ads of its own. This practice served, Eich argued, to enable quicker loading of news pages, and to "protect the data sovereignty and anonymity" of users. Unlike on Facebook, say, no data trail would be left by those who clicked on the items. Moreover, Brave would offer 55-70% of ad revenue directly back to the original publisher.

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