My friend Kevin Anderson, over on the other side of the pond, pulled back the curtain today on Open Platform, "a service that will allow partners to reuse guardian.co.uk content and data for free and weave it 'into the fabric of the internet.'"

I've heard it thousands of times: "The big mistake newspapers made was not charging for access from the beginning."

But it's not true that newspapers didn't charge for access right from the beginning.

Let's roll back the clock about 15 years. Here are some of the newspapers that were pursuing the paid-access model:

I've been using Twitterfall to track a number of topics lately, including Drupal, and I've noticed a couple of widely held beliefs. One is that Drupal is hard to install and the other is that Drupal themes suck.

This is likely to be ignored by advocates of charging for access to local news websites, but I'm going to pass out some free advice anyway.

Before embarrassing yourself and imperiling your company's future, consider the following barriers to your great new idea.

They are not all insurmountable, but if you plow forward in ignorance, a lot of people are going to get hurt.

I'm serious: Can we please stop talking about averages, medians and means? Can we please top thinking like we're living in 1955? There are no average people and no average products, blogs or newspapers. Everything is a special case. Get used to that.

Before some of today's dotcom millionaires were born, Roger Fidler was walking around with a wooden mockup of a flat pad that would replace print with an electronic display. Being a newspaper guy -- he worked for the Knight-Ridder chain -- he envisioned it as a way to read newspapers, without paper or ink. It look pretty much like this:

Like most news companies, after a bit of fiddling around with in-house development, we've outsourced most of our mobile services to vendors. Although none has a particularly impressive product, there's no point in throwing a lot of resources at it, particularly in the depths of a brutal business recession. There's no money for news companies in mobile services right now.