James Mills is a web developer in the North East of England and founder of Refresh Teesside »
Mike Hughes is the Head of Business for the Evening Gazette. He will be blogging on all matters of importance to Teesside businesses - and some that are just worth knowing »
Jez Davison, business writer at the Evening Gazette, is a regular blogger on all things business - particularly finance, entrepreneurship and the state of the Teesside economy » 
Karen McLauchlan is the Evening Gazette's deputy business and features editor - with special interest in all things industry, property and arts related » 
Jeremy Middleton is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of FTSE-200 company HomeServe » 
Deloitte, which has 23 offices across the UK including Newcastle, is among the country's leading professional services firms » 
ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » The late, lamented Spike Milligan once very perceptively wrote that 88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Pausing briefly to consider the acres of âÂÂinterestingâ PR-led survey stories that grace our newspapers at this time of the year (of which IâÂÂve been just as guilty as the next man over the years), IâÂÂd like to offer another, slightly more accurate one that I noted recently.
More than a quarter of all the material picked up and recycled across London every day is a discarded free newspaper â and a recent trip to the capital city showed me just how this situation has arisen.
Walking between Piccadilly Circus and Waterloo Station, which is no more than a mile and a half at most, we must have had free copies of London Lite and The London Paper thrust at us by at least 20 different, but equally enthusiastic distributors, all of whom were dressed in day-glo coloured uniforms that donâÂÂt normally get worn outside the headquarters of CBeebies.
Add in the more established Metro newspaper, and the fact that these papers are actually designed to be left behind on tubes, buses and park benches for subsequent readers to pick up, and you quickly see how this mountain of newsprint rises up every day.
ThereâÂÂs a real battle going on in London which is expected to see at least one of these free titles go to the wall in the relatively short-term, as the battle for continually-shrinking advertising budgets reaches a crescendo, and itâÂÂs one that, in time, will be replicated in cyberspace.
The national daily and Sunday newspapers have all invested very heavily in their online presence, with even Associated Press, which had resisted taking a serious look into cyberspace until very recently, now having instigated an all-singing, all-dancing website for the Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday.
With online advertising now receiving the biggest proportion of companiesâ marketing budgets, it makes a great deal of sense for newspapers to be doing this and they are all trying to get the maximum number of users to log on.
But to quote another well-known maxim, âÂÂthereâÂÂs no such thing as a free lunchâ â and in my opinion, the free access that we currently enjoy to almost all these sites will eventually evolve into subscriber-only admission to all but the most superficial levels.
With its more specialised readership, the Financial Times has already successfully gone down this route with the admittedly-excellent ft.com, and many specialist trade publicationsâ websites are already all but closed to non-subscribers.
And with the drive towards offering everything possible via your PC now seemingly unstoppable, weâÂÂre going to have little choice but to sign up if we want to keep reading our preferred publications, just as anyone wanting to watch live Premiership football is tied into a loving relationship with BSkyB or, more recently, Setanta.
I suspect that we will eventually look back on the early years of this century as the âÂÂgolden ageâ of free online content â and as we do, IâÂÂm sure thereâÂÂll a PR person there writing a survey-based press release about how much better 68.3% people think things were in the old daysâÂÅ ..
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