The Economist has excellent coverage on old media and the challenges of today. In the same issue is this piece on News Corporation and this excellent piece on newspaper giveaways. I’ve commented here before about giveaways. Consumers focus on giveaways and not the newspaper and the sooner advertisers realise the con of this game to boost audit figures the better. Giveaways to support a price change are fine with me, it’s the sustained and seemingly irrelevant campaigns at audit time which cause retailers pain and result in skewed figures.