Newspaper websites get AOL chief's thumbs down

Simon Hinde, director of AOL in Britain, has been sounding off about newspapers' inadequacies in coping with news on the net. "They are stuck on the hard shoulder of the information superhighway", he says. "In the face of a wave of media democratisation, many are still behaving rather like Iron Curtain commissars in 1989". But not all is bad, Hinde concedes. "Papers remain hugely powerful brands", and Metro shows that "it is possible to produce a newspaper that makes sense in the modern media age". He also praises The Guardian's commentisfree site as "a genuine attempt to get to grips with the blogging phenomenon." (Via Journalism.co.uk)