Until recently freesheets have had it too easy, usually ending up as cosy monopolies, but the market is proving too lucrative to stay that way. Associated Newspapers launched a freebie in Dublin under the Metro name, prompting a counter-move by Independent News & Media in the form of Herald AM. Similar fun will follow elsewhere.

It’s now possible that London could see a plethora of freesheets — because the Underground and mainline station contracts are being handled separately, because Standard Lite is already out there and because a publisher that doesn’t win any of the concessions might launch a give-away outside the stations anyway. City AM has shown that the cost of handing out copies is not a bar to success.

So, what’s all this about? Curiously in the age of the internet, paper is showing a bit of revival — although paper products are gradually becoming a shop window for websites, which is partly why The Times is on sale in New York. In the internet era it becomes possible to promote the best houses, jobs or holidays in the paper while directing readers to the searchable database online. If publishers don’t do that, newspapers are at risk of death as websites without editorial, such as Craigslist in the US or the likes of Rightmove over here, simply steal all the small-ad revenues.

However, trying to vacuum up classified advertising via a newspaper-plus-internet strategy is difficult in a big city such as London. Up in Preston, though, Johnston Press, owner of the Lancashire Evening Post, is conducting its own internet experiment, retraining reporters to produce video (you can watch the chief sports writer reminisce about David Beckham’s spell on loan at Preston North End in February 1995).

Whether readers want to watch their reporters is not yet certain, but for a modest £200,000 Johnston has made some attempt to invest in skills rather than force hapless hacks to produce amateur podcasts with the minimum of help. The idea is to improve reader loyalty at a modest cost — and by tight integration Johnston is trying to avoid creating a separate digital division staffed by non-journalist technocrats keen to build their own empire.

In Preston, Johnston’s prospects appear to be better than the Standard’s in London. The smaller the city, the more entrenched the local paper is in the regional economy. American data produced by the publisher shows that Craigslist has a larger share of job listings in Los Angeles than the local paper’s website. In a mid-size city such as Baltimore, the local paper overtakes Craigslist, while in small-town Tuscaloosa the local paper dominates, taking half the available share.

That’s good news for the Lancashire Evening Post and local papers like it, but not for London. It is not clear who is going to win from the forthcoming freesheet war in the capital, but it promises to be a costly struggle in which the Craigslists and Googles may hold the best cards. But the fight will be fun.

• So EMI wants to be in charge of Warner, and Warner wants to be in charge of EMI. This is first-class entertainment, but it will be no way to run a merged record company, at which there will have to be co-operation at some level to achieve all the cost savings that justify the deal.

In one sense Warner has the upper hand, because it is run by a shareholders’ club of private equity investors, while EMI is a tedious, how-fast-can-the-pension-funds-sell public company. But that may be just how Warner’s money men want it.

Rich Greenfield, one of the smartest Wall Street media analysts, wonders whether Warner’s venture capitalists really want to delay their exit for another two years while waiting for regulatory approvals. Good luck to them if they do; or do they just want to squeeze the best price out of EMI by scaring them with counterbids?

Yet even that may be too simple. What happens if EMI or Warner manages to seize the up-for-sale BMG Music Publishing, perhaps in conjunction with a venture capital partner? Would that create an effective poison pill, making one or the other harder to acquire? It has been six years since this deal was first mooted; it would be surprising if it took just one higher bid to get it done at last.

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